Unauthorized Trash Can
Casey:
Now everything is suspect at this point.
Casey:
I don't even know what's working.
John:
You know what else is suspect?
John:
We went live before we did pre-flight.
John:
So now we're going to do a visual pre-flight for the bootleg members.
John:
Are you ready?
Casey:
A visual pre-flight?
Casey:
Why can't we do an audio pre-flight?
John:
Everyone, please look at the document.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I don't know if I have you.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Yes, carry on.
John:
All right.
John:
So first, we're going to do this part.
John:
Why can't we do this verbally?
Casey:
Why is this a problem?
John:
Mark up because the pre-flight is secret.
John:
Marco says that this part is not going to take a long time, and I hope so.
John:
He's full of it.
John:
Because I want this part to be very close to the front of the program, and I would like Casey to throw to me for this part so I can try to get it in and out quick.
John:
Then we have our regular... Wait, stop.
Casey:
Why don't we reverse those?
Casey:
Why are we not reversing these?
John:
Because this leads into...
John:
this no no no slow down i'm saying why don't we do the the i can't say oh i asked marco about i asked marco about that while you were off rebooting that does not belong before the modem sound yeah and marco thinks this order is better and he said he'll be short okay anyway all right we had this discussion without you casey if you just got to be here for the whole meeting you'll get it oh kiss my ass
John:
all right so then we got all this stuff here uh our usual stuff um notice there is a next week divider so we're not actually going to do all of it yeah uh then all the way down here we have this this is the worst content we ever made so over here we have we have this from marco all right and he can take all the time he wants with that because the only thing you have after it is this from me which actually isn't that long and if we want to skip it again it's fine and then we have this well wait i lost it what is the last one
Casey:
Yeah, we went back north.
John:
I scrolled up.
John:
I scrolled up.
John:
We went back north.
John:
If we have to skip this thing for me again, it's fine, because again, it'll keep, and then we scroll up, and then we have this.
Casey:
Holy crap.
Casey:
I think I have whiplash.
Casey:
Oh, gosh.
Casey:
All right, this is what the people tune in for.
John:
The main part was just the beginning part and sorting this stuff out or whatever.
John:
Actually, I would have done more pre-flight stuff if we were actually off the air, but we aren't, so.
Marco:
I drove a box truck.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
Was it a cardboard box that you fashioned into a truck or was it actually a truck in the shape of a box?
Marco:
It was not that interesting.
Marco:
It was a budget moving truck.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
And the excuse for that was to relocate belongings, I presume?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Typically, you use moving trucks to move objects.
Marco:
And that was that was indeed the use here.
Marco:
We are we are moving.
Marco:
We are selling a house.
Marco:
And, you know, so we're moving out of it and moving our stuff to a new house.
Marco:
And it is a big ordeal that I'll be going through for some time.
Marco:
This was stage one.
Marco:
This wasn't like, you know, everything because this is the first time we are selling a house.
Marco:
The process of selling a house first involves you taking like three quarters of your stuff out of it to stage it to make it look like a total superhuman lives there who doesn't live the way anybody lives.
Marco:
So stage one is like get rid of much of your stuff.
Marco:
um and and that we'll get to more of that later in the show i think but uh but anyway yes yes we will but the gist of it is um i we rented a budget truck to move a whole bunch of stuff uh into a storage unit temporarily and which and that's this is all like i've never used a storage unit before that's new to me um the last time i drove a rental truck like this i i drove a u-haul when i moved to pittsburgh in 2004 and
Marco:
and not since then, as far as I know.
Marco:
I can tell you that the rental truck industry has actually not seemingly changed that much since 2004.
Marco:
The truck back then, just a regular U-Haul, like a 10 or 12-foot truck, not like a separate trailer or anything, just a regular 12-foot box truck.
Marco:
Back then, it was very difficult because not only was the truck itself this horrendous thing that barely moved, but
Marco:
Back then, this was in the summer.
Marco:
It didn't have air conditioning.
Marco:
It didn't even have any kind of input for the radio.
Marco:
So what I did to amuse myself on... And I had to drive it on like a four-hour drive.
Marco:
So what I did to amuse myself was I put my PowerBook G4...
Marco:
on the passenger seat, just open, and just blasted music from iTunes as loud as it would go.
Marco:
From those high-quality speakers.
Marco:
Yeah, on the built-in speakers on the PowerBook G4.
Marco:
Although, to be honest, I... Man.
Marco:
So, when I was done with that computer, I had to sell it to fund my Core Duo MacBook and...
Marco:
I wish I didn't sell it because I had it.
Marco:
It was in pristine condition.
Marco:
It was my first Mac.
Marco:
I wish I still had it today.
Marco:
I mean, it couldn't have worked.
John:
Maybe I should send you some junk from my house because I have that same Mac and it's in pristine condition.
John:
Well, kind of pristine.
John:
I think I upgraded the hard drive on it myself, so there may be a little bit of entry damage.
Marco:
We'll negotiate that later.
Marco:
But anyway, so the new moving truck that I rented this week, it is significantly upgraded in the sense that they now come with air conditioning.
Marco:
They still lack power locks and power windows.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
Which basically means, well, you just can't roll down the right side window because you can't reach it, you know.
Marco:
And the lack of power locks is certainly interesting.
Marco:
Like, when you have to, like, you know, go in and get gas, like, you better remember to lock it, you know.
Marco:
Then you got to, like, lock it by putting a key in it and turning it.
Marco:
There's not even, like, a key fob, like, with a remote.
Marco:
You have to actually insert the key into the door and turn it to lock it, which is not difficult.
Marco:
It's just something I haven't had to do in a very long way.
Marco:
time because key fobs have been a thing for quite some time now my favorite thing about driving this box truck is that it had a rear view mirror i don't entirely know why because it was looking at the box yes it's just looking at the back of the passenger compartment the solid wall so i don't know why it had a a rear view mirror but it did um
Marco:
The radio still today had no inputs, no cassette deck.
Marco:
It was just a radio.
Marco:
It had like a menu button, but I went into there like there's no I was like, oh, maybe they snuck some Bluetooth in here.
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
No Bluetooth.
Marco:
Nothing.
Marco:
There was a USB port in the dash, but it was dead.
Marco:
My only entertainment method is I wasn't prepared.
Marco:
If I had advance notice that I was going to be doing this by a long way and I actually planned for it, I would have gotten a vent mount for my phone and maybe an FM transmitter for the radio.
Marco:
I had neither of those things.
Marco:
So I just put the phone in the cup holder and had the wonderful experience of trying to echo the sound out of the cup holder so it amplifies.
Marco:
We've all done this, right?
Casey:
Why not use like a single AirPod or something?
Marco:
I've always been told that like you shouldn't wear headphones while driving.
Marco:
And some people even say it's illegal.
Marco:
I'm not sure if that's true or where that might be true.
Marco:
But, you know, I didn't want, you know, when I'm driving this giant vehicle I'm not familiar with, I didn't want to like have any risk of not hearing a horn or something like that, you know, as I accidentally merge into somebody.
Marco:
The reason I brought this to the show is briefly – first of all, just to mention trucks are – turns out trucks are hard.
Marco:
Driving a truck is hard.
Marco:
It was no easier than it was back in 2004.
Marco:
It just had air conditioning this time.
Marco:
It also smelled no better.
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
It's like the smell of this – it was – you've all smelled this before.
Marco:
It's the smell of a really old car that hasn't been cleaned that well throughout its life.
Marco:
it's a it's hard to describe it's it's like the smell like old car upholstery uh it's kind of like a combination it's like it's not smoke per se but it's like fast food and farts like i i don't know it's weird it but you and like i just stunk like that the rest of the day like i had to wash all those clothes like everything just right off
Marco:
I was done.
Marco:
But anyway, driving a truck is hard.
Marco:
And one of the things that makes driving a truck hard is that there's a lot of roads that trucks aren't allowed on or won't fit on.
Marco:
And in New York around here, there's tons of parkways and New York parkways don't allow trucks.
Marco:
And the way to get almost anywhere involves a parkway at some point.
Marco:
So I was searching before, you know, one of the key advances that I've had since 2004 is now we have cell phones.
Marco:
You know, instead of having my power book on the seat, now I have my phone in the cup holder to play music that way, which sounds about as good.
Marco:
But now we have GPS apps.
Marco:
And that's great because to try to get from anywhere in the New York metro area to anywhere else in the New York metro area without GPS apps that are somewhat traffic aware is not fun.
Marco:
But like I knew from experience driving the RV a couple of years ago, I talked about it on the show.
Marco:
I knew like I can't just use Waze or Apple Maps or Google Maps because they don't have any options as far as I can tell to only ride on roads that trucks are allowed on.
Marco:
So not to ride on any New York Parkways and things like that.
Marco:
gps apps seem seem to not cover this well at least like all the mainstream apps i looked in google maps i looked in apple maps i looked in ways none of them seem unless if anybody knows please write in um i don't i couldn't find any options to to give me like a a truck allowed route in any of the mainstream apps
John:
You should find out what apps the truckers use because surely it's useful knowledge to them, right?
Marco:
Well, so I asked, I guess, Mr. Budget, the guy at the budget pickup place.
Marco:
I asked Mr. Budget, do you know of any GPS apps on the phone that will give me a truck route?
Marco:
And he suggested this app called Truck Map.
Marco:
great so i i download truck map this these between truck map and the other app i tried which we'll get to in a second this was a series of total failures of app review um to the point where if you've ever been rejected by app review this is going to make you mad oh oh great i'm so excited so so truck map and you know it seemed to have a lot of use a lot of ratings and
Marco:
For no reason that I could tell, it requires your phone number just to use the app at all.
Marco:
I don't know why.
Marco:
I had to give it my phone number to do anything.
Marco:
There is no obvious functionality that seems to justify needing a phone number, but I had to give it a verified, like it verified it with the SMS and everything, verified a phone number.
Marco:
Okay, so they're going to spam me forever.
Marco:
Great, thanks a lot.
Marco:
So I drove from the budget pickup place back to house number one using truck map.
Marco:
And this was a wonderful app in terms of it did pick truck safe routes, except that it would say, for instance, you know, turn right onto whatever in four miles and then never say it again.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
So as you're approaching the turn that it told you about five minutes ago, it doesn't tell you turn right.
Marco:
It does.
Marco:
It will never tell you that direction again.
Marco:
So you just have to be watching it, I guess, which is not super safe, especially in a truck that you've never driven and you aren't a truck driver.
John:
I've recently switched to not having the voice on like this past year.
John:
I haven't had the voice on on my GPS.
John:
And obviously that doesn't tell you.
John:
ever to turn and it's a different style of driving but it's the same type of thing you say okay i have to turn right coming up in like three miles and you mostly just like i glance back at it to see that i am at where i think i'm at but it never speaks to you did it not show you like the road and like where you are relative to it it did but it was in a cup holder way down there not in my field of view anywhere so i kind of need the voice thing so anyway well i mean what you need to know is the name of the road and you know back in the day we didn't have gps and we just drive by looking at a hagstrom and then you get in the car and go
John:
I know, but now I'm spoiled.
John:
Okay.
Casey:
So, yeah, exactly.
Casey:
So wait, so really quick, since we're, since we've distracted you from this story that you promised was going to be short and is nothing of the matter.
Casey:
Uh, what, so what are the parkways nearby?
Casey:
So it's sawmill, the hutch, what other ones are, are in your northern state, southern state.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The cross County, the cross Island, like there's,
Casey:
So none of those are permissible for your budget truck.
Marco:
Basically, to get from Westchester to Long Island, I would normally go on at least two and possibly up to four parkways.
Marco:
Anyway, so truck map that required my phone number, bad.
Marco:
Very, very bad.
Marco:
So after I had loaded the truck and I was about to do the big drive, the big two-and-a-half-hour drive, I thought, all right, before I start this giant drive, let me get a better app.
Marco:
So I looked around the app store, and the one that seemed like the more popular one was called Trucker Path.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
This didn't tell me, you know, before downloading that, oh, it says it does truck GPS, but what it actually does is regular GPS and only does truck paths if you have an in-app purchase.
Marco:
Okay, well, fine, whatever.
Marco:
The purchase to get the truck route... Is hundreds of dollars.
Marco:
Yeah, it prominently advertised it was $20 a month.
Marco:
The UI had the big $20 a month price.
Marco:
So you go hit subscribe.
Marco:
You start the free trial, thank God.
Marco:
Start the free trial.
Marco:
And if you don't look too closely, you might miss the fact... Billed annually?
Marco:
Yes, billed annually.
Marco:
It's actually a $250 annual subscription that would start in one week.
Marco:
Oh, my word.
John:
Hey, at least I had a one-week free trial.
Marco:
Yeah, thank God.
Marco:
So I did cancel it before the week was up, thank God.
Marco:
As soon as I saw that, I'm like, oh, add a note to reminders right now.
Marco:
Like this.
Marco:
Anyway, my favorite part, so we have misleading pricing in the purchase screen.
Marco:
Then, after the in-app purchase is completed, so after you have either purchased it or signed up for the trial, so you're in now, it puts up a modal screen that you cannot pass until you give them an email address that it verifies.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
Where is AppReview on this?
Marco:
AppReview gives us so much crap for such little things in like indie apps.
Marco:
Meanwhile, here's this app that's used by what appear to be hundreds of thousands of people.
Marco:
It has a misleading IAP pricing screen, pretty severely misleading.
Marco:
And then after the IAP, it forces you to give an email address with no way to proceed until you do.
Marco:
And by that point, you're committed.
Marco:
You've already purchased it.
Marco:
But you can't actually use your purchase until you give them an email address.
Marco:
Like, where is AppReview?
Marco:
Is anybody at AppReview?
Marco:
Does anybody work there?
John:
Anyway.
John:
Those screens don't appear when it's in AppReview.
Casey:
That wouldn't surprise me, actually.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Common practice, Marco.
John:
I don't know why you don't do it.
John:
And load this SDK into your app and it will detect when it's in an AppReview testing center and it will disable all those screens.
Marco:
So anyway, this is the app that I was taking the big drive with.
Marco:
I'm like, I can't be worse than truck map, you know, because I need these voice directions to work because I can't look at my phone constantly in a cup holder.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I get on the road with this app.
Marco:
Now, it had told me the first direction was whatever direction the truck was currently pointed in, you know, turn right on the next street.
Marco:
Well, when I left my driveway, I went the other way because the way it was telling me to go would have been down a very steep hill that I was not going to take an unknown old truck.
Marco:
So I went the other direction out the block.
Marco:
It's like half a block out of the way.
Marco:
I'm getting on the road.
Marco:
You know, I saw what highway it was taking me to, so I was kind of navigating myself to the highway, and I realized it hasn't told me anything recently.
Marco:
Huh, what's going on?
Marco:
And I looked down at the cup holder phone, and it is still showing the first direction that I didn't take.
Marco:
Oh, gosh.
Marco:
It never rerouted?
Marco:
it never rerouted and never moved on cool so it's saying turn right on street that's like that's now at this point like 10 miles behind me i'm on the highway at this point and i'm like oh my god i don't know where to go unless i just keep following the line which i can't keep looking at in the cup holder i'm stuck so i i eventually had to like pull off into one of those gas station things that's like attached to the highway not a rest stop you know in new york you don't have room for that it's like these it's basically a gas station where the driveways just are the highway
Marco:
it's it's right you know a little bit off the highway uh by about 10 feet and so i had to pull into one of those where the truck would actually fit and uh and you know reset the acting and take it out force quit it go back in there's a whole eventually at once i did that and then i followed its directions perfectly then trucker path worked so in case you want to pay 250 a year that's the quality app that you get
Marco:
and so for this and many reasons driving a truck is hard so so and and even like the truck safe routes that you have to take are the worst routes to get to anywhere you want to be because you can only like because you know when you're in here like a third or a half of the highways you aren't allowed to take so you're only on like the most crowded highways that are full of trucks if you're a truck driver in the new york metro area i salute you it it was it's not easy
Marco:
And, you know, people are like zipping all around me, like being real jerks.
Marco:
Like it was you have to take all these like indirect routes, detours you got to take.
Marco:
Of course, you know, merging is really hard.
Marco:
There's all these like right side merges you have to do, which is super not easy, especially in these crappy trucks with no visibility.
Marco:
There are so many places like I really had to go to the bathroom.
Marco:
But a lot of the places that it's easy to stop, like these little side rest area things, a lot of them in this area are too small for trucks and therefore don't allow trucks.
Marco:
Like I passed the Long Island Welcome Center, which is funny because it's in the middle of Long Island.
Marco:
And there's no trucks because it's a little tiny lot.
Marco:
So yeah, driving a truck is hard.
Marco:
If you...
Marco:
are driving please first of all be nice to truck drivers give them a break let them in etc like be be nice driving a truck is difficult um and second of all if you see a u-haul or a budget or other kind of like rental truck on the road um
Marco:
Stay far away from it because chances are they can't see you.
Marco:
Also, those people have probably never driven a truck before.
Marco:
Anyway, this is a ripe market for disruption.
Marco:
Make this easier with GPS apps or like Apple Maps, Google Maps, Waze, add a truck option.
Marco:
Frankly, I'm shocked.
Marco:
I figured at least Waze would, but I couldn't find anything like that in any of these apps.
John:
If Apple was based in New York, it would know about the Parkways, but they're not, so it doesn't.
Casey:
I'm not sure that they would.
Casey:
I hear what you're saying, but I don't know if that's really true.
Casey:
Because, I don't know.
John:
I mean, they have avoid tolls.
John:
Every app has avoid tolls.
Casey:
Yeah, but that's table stakes.
Casey:
That's why.
John:
Well, it's because they have toll roads in California.
Casey:
Well, I guess you're right.
John:
Actually, I don't even know if they have toll roads in California.
John:
If you live in California, please don't tell me you don't have toll roads.
John:
I don't want to know.
John:
Have fun paying your $800 a year for your LLC.
John:
As opposed to the bargain $500 that I pay.
John:
Yeah, great bargain.
Marco:
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Casey:
John, you've been doing a bunch of homework, which I think is okay now.
Casey:
We really never renegotiated that, but you've been doing a bunch of homework.
Casey:
Tell me about this, please.
John:
So last episode, we talked in the after show about membership and the ad landscape and podcast, and we asked for feedback.
John:
We got tons of feedback.
John:
Thanks to everybody who sent us feedback.
John:
But as we mentioned on the last episode, we also wanted to try to get like more structured feedback and hopefully from many more people because we got a lot of feedback, but you know,
John:
People who choose to email us or to dat us or whatever are a smaller number compared to the vast number of listeners.
John:
So as we said we would, we have a survey for people to fill out.
John:
This survey is for every single person who can hear my voice.
John:
Doesn't matter what your membership status is or was or anything.
John:
If you're a listener to this program, we want you to fill out the survey.
John:
Tried to make it short.
John:
There's a couple of different paths through it depending on what your answers are.
John:
But I don't think the longest path I think is 10 questions or fewer maybe.
John:
They're all multiple choice except for the optional ones.
John:
So if you just want to click a bunch of buttons and don't want to fill in any text fields, that's fine.
John:
If you do want to enter stuff in text fields, there are a couple of questions like that.
John:
The URL is the same as always, atp.fm slash survey.
John:
We will link it in the show notes.
John:
That's where you want to go.
John:
Hopefully we'll get enough responses that this is the only time we'll need to mention it.
John:
But if not enough people respond for us to feel like we have a significant sample, we'll mention it next week.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So yeah, just to repeat, whether or not you're a member, if you're a current member, a lapsed member, a never member, all of you are welcome to please check it out.
Casey:
It would help us to understand what you folks want from us and what's best for membership and so on.
Casey:
It is very quick.
Casey:
I have taken every permutation of this, both in the sense of every draft, and also I have clicked my way, choose your own adventure style, to every permutation of the final version.
Casey:
It should only take you a couple of minutes.
Casey:
It's very, very quick.
Casey:
So please check it out.
Marco:
Yeah, the key things that are really worth hearing about, and we got a lot of this from the email, but this is a larger, more structured way to get it.
Marco:
The key things we want to know is basically what's important to you and what's not.
Marco:
That's really the major conclusions here.
Marco:
Because we can guess.
Marco:
We can say, oh, maybe we should do more X or maybe we should adjust Y. But it's hard for us to know what's important to a lot of people and what's not important to a lot of people.
Marco:
So anyway...
John:
And it's dangerous to rely on the people who message us because their opinions are certainly valid, but we don't know if they're representative.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Because the people who respond to us on a show depends a lot on what we say on the show.
John:
So if we say something on the show, we'll get responses that are related to what we said, but don't necessarily reflect...
John:
what everyone is thinking.
John:
If we talk a lot about white miso paste, we're not going to get a lot of responses about garlic because people are going to be like, oh, here's what's good about miso paste.
John:
Here's what's bad about miso paste.
John:
It's like, I guess our audience loves miso paste and hates garlic.
John:
You can't make that conclusion because we talked about white miso paste.
John:
Why am I thinking of this?
John:
Because I was cleaning out the fridge.
John:
Anyway, so that's why we wanted to do a survey.
John:
We hope just everybody takes a survey.
John:
Whoever you are, click, click, click, click, click.
John:
Ten questions, you'll be done.
John:
Please take it.
Casey:
Can we do some follow-up about the survey, please?
John:
Right now?
John:
Yes.
John:
The one we just announced?
John:
People haven't even filled it out yet.
Casey:
Well, some people in the chat room are filling it out, and somebody who shall remain nameless had the same complaint that Marco and I did.
Casey:
Would you like to address this?
Casey:
This person said none of these options should be at the bottom.
John:
I believe in Will HBR in the chat room.
John:
I believe that person can figure it out on his own while I say something else about the survey.
John:
So the clock starts seven seconds from now, Will HBR.
John:
Tell me why it's not at the bottom.
John:
Okay.
John:
The one thing I will say about the survey is there is one question that says, which one of these things on its own would make you become an ATP member?
John:
Obviously, you don't see this if you're already a member.
John:
But for people who aren't members, they get this question presented.
John:
And I tried to bold and italic the important part, which is which one of these things on its own and their checkboxes.
John:
So you can select multiple.
John:
So it's like we give you a million dollars if we show you a cute puppy.
John:
Right.
John:
Are those options on the table?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So you check the box if one of those line items all by itself with nothing else would convince you to become a member.
John:
so don't check three of them and say if you did these three i would become a member i tried to word it as clearly as i could we're trying to condense it so there aren't a million questions so there's just that one question but the part that's in bold and italic which part on its own would make you become a member anyway uh checking back in with uh will hbr from the chat room could not work it out on his own anyone else in the chat room going once going twice uh the options are randomized
John:
because we don't want people to be, you know, to be influenced by the order that we put the multiple options.
John:
Google Forms has a way that says, hey, do you want me to randomize these options?
John:
But of course, it also randomizes the none of the above.
John:
So I apologize for none of the above being mixed in, but I felt it was more important to randomize the options so we didn't bias people.
John:
So every time you get one of those questions with multiple options, they're in a random order for you.
John:
I apologize for none of the above sometimes being in the middle.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Thank you for that.
Casey:
And then finally, in our announcement section, we have a new member special.
Casey:
So we had an incredible fortuitous bit of timing, wherein we totally decided on purpose, and it definitely was not accidental, to rank or do a tier list of every iMac.
Casey:
And we have this member special that was released, I think, yesterday as we record.
Casey:
It is available to any current member.
Casey:
And any future member.
Casey:
that's true thank you thank you for that clarification uh so yeah i encourage you to check it out it started with john and i getting in a fight so you know it'll be good it's shocking that you know the three of us don't always agree on everything all right so uh with that in mind let's start with some follow-up and let me check my notes flip flip oh we have we have notes and follow-up about the imac tier list so uh spoiler alert if you haven't listened yet
Marco:
So the key thing here is that there was a point in the iMac tier list where we had to discuss the 2006, when they first went to Intel, the first batch of Intel Macs had the Core Duo CPUs.
Marco:
And then within a fairly short time, I think like seven or eight months, they upgraded to the Core 2 Duo.
Marco:
In this part of the show, I'll spoil it for people here briefly, in this part of the show, John expressed feelings that the core two duo was significantly better than the core duo.
Marco:
And Casey and I had basically said it was a little better.
Marco:
It wasn't a ton better.
Marco:
And so we have some follow up to that effect.
Marco:
right so michael gabriel writes uh the court's core used the 32-bit mobile only yona cpus which is a descendant of the pentium n pentium m m yeah m that's the important one it's the pentium m like totally flipped intel on its head like it was it was way better than the dumb netburst stuff they were making before that and that's basically what saved their cpu business
Casey:
And then the Core 2 marked the transition of Intel Desktop from Netburst, as you mentioned, which is a Pentium 4 and D, scaling up Yonah for desktops and adding 64-bit to it.
Casey:
The x86-64 migration meant more than, greater than 4 gigs of memory.
Casey:
AMD used 64-bit to add registers, improve floating point and vector processing, etc.
Casey:
Intel was forced to follow.
Casey:
Big Performance Boost was available to 64-bit software on x86, all unavailable to Core 1 Max, the only non-64-bit Intel Max ever.
Marco:
Yes, and that all sounds really good.
Marco:
Yes, Core 2 was 64-bit, and Core was not.
Marco:
But, see, to me, this was a kind of marketing jiu-jitsu here.
Marco:
A lot of people thought, a lot of people kind of missed the word duo, and they thought Core Duo, after Core 2 Duo came out, they assumed Core Duo only had one core, and the Core 2 Duos were dual core.
Marco:
And that was not the case.
Marco:
Core 2 Duo sounds like it could be twice as good as Core Duo.
Marco:
It wasn't.
Marco:
And in fact, you can go, fortunately, the wonderful site EveryMac, which I'm sure all of us are familiar with being Apple nerds, EveryMac has benchmark histories for all these Macs that they list.
Marco:
And so we can see, now, modern versions of Geekbench are 64-bit only, so they were never run on this computer, right?
Marco:
But you can go look at like the old Geekbench 2 32-bit scores and you can see actually the Core Duo versus Core 2 Duo at the same clock speed.
Marco:
The Core 2 Duo is only about 4% faster in Geekbench.
Marco:
They both have the same max RAM of 2 gigs.
Marco:
Because, you know, this was back when the standard amount of RAM was like 512.
Marco:
So the idea that they would support more than 4 gigs of memory in theory, that's great, but they didn't need it yet.
Marco:
And the motherboards couldn't support that anyway.
Marco:
So EveryMac actually published a whole article.
Marco:
How much faster is the Core 2 Duo than the Core Duo?
Marco:
And they said, quote, the Core 2 Duo processor design is modestly more efficient than the Core Duo processor that it replaced.
Marco:
And they even quoted a section of a Macworld review that has, that since now at 404s, it's because it's an ancient URL, Macworld ran their speed benchmark, and they said the Core Duo scored 210, the Core 2 Duo scored 232, so 10% faster, but that was at an 8% faster clock speed too.
Marco:
So when you actually compare the Core 2 Duo to the Core Duo,
Marco:
Yes, 64-bit software compatibility mattered way, way, way down the line.
Marco:
But at the time they were released, this was not a huge difference.
Marco:
It was like a spec bump, basically.
Marco:
It was between 5% and 10% faster in most things.
Marco:
And much of the speed increase was due to the fact that the Core 2 Duo, because it was...
Marco:
newer it was available in higher clock speeds you know eventually so that was more relevant to the uh to the performance gains than than the actual core design in other words i was right your complaint though no your complaint was that i was saying like uh the core 2 duo is way better because why you'd feel so bad getting the core duo the only 32-bit intel max if less than a year later you could get a core 2 to over 64-bit
John:
I think that's a big deal, not because macOS 10 or something is suddenly going to drop 32-bit support, because that happened way later, but because, as Michael wrote in to tell us, software that's recompiled in 64-bit goes way faster.
John:
I don't even know if these benchmarks were compiled for 64-bit for the Core 2 Duo.
John:
That's the whole point, that it's not just like, oh, it's 64-bit, so you can get bigger integers or whatever.
John:
It's substantially changed architecture.
John:
x86-64 is different.
John:
More registers.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
better better vector things right but i don't know if the benchmarks you're citing here even in 64 but even if they are comparing clock for clock who cares the whole point is you feel bad because you got the imac with the bad processor you're not when you get the core 2 duo you don't care that the other one is was even if it was equally fast clock for clock if yours is clock tire the whole point is you bought a loser machine less than a year later a much better one came out for basically the same price and you were you're stuck in this little area all by yourself with 32 bit
John:
i still say the core duo is much worse and i even forgotten about the 64 bit things oh and by the way that same article you cited from every mac the very last line of the article is ultimately 10 to 20 percent faster may not be quite as high as apple's grandiose claims but still substantial nevertheless so you scored the line that said modestly more efficient and they say substantial nevertheless 10 to 20 percent core two duo you wanted that one not the core duo
Marco:
Well, but see, to me, it's a similar level of performance increase as going from M1 to M2.
Marco:
The fact is, the M1 is really... I'm using the M1 now.
John:
But we don't know it's the same performance increase because we don't know if these benchmarks were running 64-bit on the Core 2 Duo.
John:
If they weren't, it's not a fair or representative comparison because things went 64-bit pretty fast.
John:
You know why?
John:
Because this was literally the only 32-bit Intel's ever made.
John:
Everything else was 64-bit Intel.
John:
And so software was recompiled for 64-bit Intel and it got faster.
John:
And I bet this benchmark did too.
John:
yeah anyway i would say that my point stands and casey i believe agrees like the core two duo yes it was better but it wasn't massively better yeah but my point still stands if you got the core duo and then seven months later your friend got the core two duo you felt like you got the loser mac no nobody cared except you no i don't know i don't know people who live through it marco says he loved his core duo and thought it was great but maybe he's just like he really loved he really loved his saturn too so and his sega
Casey:
What was your memoir, John?
Casey:
And no, not everyone cares but me, but I really care or something like that.
Casey:
I butchered it, but it's something on my list.
Marco:
You're close.
Marco:
You're close.
Marco:
Nobody else cares but me, but I do care.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
There it is.
John:
I don't think it was a, was it a memoir or was it like an autobiography?
John:
It's different.
John:
Maybe.
John:
I didn't, I didn't make up the joke art, so I don't know.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
We need Merlin, but that's right.
John:
Anyway, cartoon duo forever.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Can we move on?
Casey:
Max Wilkie writes, the 21 inch iMac definitely did come in retina.
Casey:
I still own one that's only a few feet away from me.
Casey:
It's even got an SSD as configured, though I did have to order it as custom.
Casey:
I don't think they ever came standard.
Casey:
So we were debating.
John:
This was my fault.
Casey:
No, I was right there with you.
John:
I think the reason we remembered is because they kept selling the non retina one for so long.
John:
Not that it was the only thing that you could get, but I think they sold it for way longer than we thought.
Marco:
Yeah, the 21-inch iMac line was the home of, like, let's keep around the old cheap stuff as long as possible to keep this computer cheap.
Marco:
So they kept around Retina way longer—or, sorry, they kept around non-Retina way longer than everything else, including the MacBook Air, I believe.
Marco:
I'm not positive on that, but it was either the last or the second-to-last non-Retina Mac.
Marco:
by a long margin too from the others.
Marco:
And then they kept around the spinning hard drive in that computer longer than every other computer they sell, as far as I know.
John:
And by the way, not that we're spoiling the whole tier list thing, but the meta commentary on things like this and the tier list for youngsters who are listening to the program, we got a lot of feedback about stuff.
John:
And even on the program, I was trying to remember various things that I won't spoil this point.
John:
I'm like...
John:
wasn't there some issue with this thing or whatever?
John:
And anyway, people wrote in to tell us what it actually was.
John:
These are all things I knew like the back of my hand when I was like writing for Ars Technica.
John:
So at the time, I knew all this stuff, every detail, every minute thing.
John:
But now do I know them?
John:
No.
John:
And I know when you're young, you think it's weird.
John:
How did you know a thing at some time in the past?
John:
It's like, you know, it's your hobby and you're super into it and you know all sorts of stats about like your favorite computer, your favorite sports team or your favorite car or whatever things you're into.
John:
And but then later in life, you don't know them.
John:
That's what getting old is like, kids.
Yeah.
John:
just want to just want to tell you about that you think that if you know something now you'll always know it you'll never forget like you know the exact gear ratios of your favorite rc car when you're a kid but eventually you'll forget what company made that car it's true yeah someone with major memory issues i can tell you you're right who are you again uh all righty so that that is the end of our spoiling our own member special and
Casey:
Let's see.
Casey:
Tahir Rangwala writes, I went on a long search.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
This is text editor corner.
Casey:
I went on a long search for Mac text editor a few years back and landed on cot editor.
Casey:
It's open source, fully Mac native, lightweight, very performant and rather tasteful in its UI.
Casey:
Also, it's being actively maintained.
Casey:
So we can put that on the list.
John:
I hadn't heard of this one.
John:
And if you take a look at it, it's like, oh, it looks like a Mac text editor.
John:
I've heard it described as like a sort of a love child indie new wave clone of text made in BB edit.
John:
But anyway, it's made of Mac app and it adds text.
John:
You might want to check it out.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
And also we have Chime.
Casey:
which from the website is apparently designed to be a model citizen on the Mac.
Casey:
It blends modern features with a minimalist UI and supports language server protocol and extensions.
Casey:
LSP is the thing that lets you plug in like a Swift parser into it or something like that.
John:
No, it's a protocol for talking to a language server saying, tell me about this language.
John:
Lumpy space princess?
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
It's like, tell me, it's another process that runs that your editor communicates with and it tells you about the structure, like where are the keywords and- Right, okay, we're basically saying the same thing.
John:
Anyway, this one, Chime, is kind of like a tiny indie Mac version of VS Code in terms of what the UI looks like.
John:
But obviously, this is the bad description of both of them.
John:
You should check them both out because they're both small and new and interesting.
John:
And I hadn't heard of either one.
Casey:
And then apparently we didn't want me to suffer just once.
Casey:
Nay, let me suffer twice.
Casey:
John put in follow-up with regard to Nay Leon.
Casey:
Nay Leon?
Casey:
Nay Leon?
John:
Did you listen to the MP3 that I put in there?
Casey:
Yeah, I did, but it was hours ago.
John:
So you've forgotten what it sounded like, right?
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Who are you again?
Casey:
Hi, this is Casey.
Casey:
So anyway...
Casey:
Nelian wrote the transcript.
Casey:
I'm going to say Nelian.
Casey:
Nelian, okay.
Casey:
That wonderful person writes, the transcription I usually give to English speakers is Nelian.
Casey:
I think that's right.
Casey:
Anyways, also I found a French text-to-speech website that does a pretty good job, and we will link that in the show notes because apparently I am inept.
John:
Yeah, so lots of people sent us, oh, here's a website that has name pronunciations.
John:
My point with the whole, like, this is a space right for disruption was not that there are not lots of these sites, it's that all these sites are bad.
John:
And so every time someone sent me a site, whether I knew about the site or not, I went to it, looked up this person's name, and then sent them a screenshot showing that this site does not know this person's name.
John:
But if it did know, it probably had a weird pronunciation.
John:
And in terms of the pronunciation, I think is an interesting feature of French, I think, where where the pronunciation here is N-E-L-A-Y.
John:
And we would say lay.
John:
But if you listen to the MP3, it's more like lay, you know, it's anyway.
John:
Well, maybe we'll put the MP3 in the show notes or I guess maybe a link to the toot in the show notes, which has like a little video to hear the name.
John:
But at the end, I think we figured it out kind of sort of finally at the end.
John:
And it's a criminal that these websites that supposedly are all about pronouncing people's names don't have your name because I have a feeling your name is not super duper rare.
Casey:
Did you know it's called fully anonymous rights on the subject of Apple Disney trash cans and Apple's inability to design places for humans the way that Disney can when building Apple Park, the designers for whatever reason neglected to put trash cans in each office.
Casey:
Instead, each hallway was given a few large bins, which are, of course, beautifully integrated into the design.
Casey:
With the apparent intention that people would get up from their desk and walk over to the nearest receptacle whenever they had something to throw away.
Casey:
I'm sure this will shock you, but this is not what ended up happening.
Casey:
Employees got so frustrated, in fact, that they eventually started just leaving their trash and piles outside their doors, which disrupted the beautiful design of the space somewhat.
Casey:
Eventually, the facilities team came to put a small, ugly, gray, plastic, Rubbermaid-looking trash can outside every office where they remain to this day.
Casey:
Can we go back to how unbelievably upset I am that people, people who are presumably intelligent to have gotten a job at Apple, are thinking it is okay to throw trash on the ground because you can't be bothered?
John:
Don't blame the people.
John:
It's a failure of design.
Casey:
What kind of Apple decides to not get up and put their trash in the trash?
Casey:
Oh, we have janitors for that.
Casey:
It's
Casey:
Screw you.
Casey:
That's not their job to pick up your trash.
Casey:
It's their job to move the trash receptacles to other trash receptacles.
Casey:
It's not there to pick up after you, you big whiner.
John:
I'm not endorsing throwing trash on the garbage, but I will say that I had no idea about the story when I used trash cans as an example of how Apple might not be as good at designing spaces for real humans as Disney is.
Marco:
but in fact it was not just like here's an analogy no literally trash cans at apple park i mean i find this first of all totally unsurprising that you know this was not properly accounted for but second of all see what i would do is i would i would never throw trash on the ground that's not me at all but thank you i would sneak in like an unauthorized trash can that is big marco energy i was gonna say the supposed solution to having the rubbermaid trash cans outside every office how does that help it's still not near you you still got to get up and go over there and put the anyway
John:
that's exactly the type of things that they talk about in these parks where like you make this beautiful space and you think this is the way it should be but then people enter it and people act like people and you're like no people act differently and really you need to design the space to account for the people even the bad people who put trash on the ground
Casey:
All right, Ezekiel Ellen writes, with regard to Mac Photos editing, when you're in Photos, you can edit in an external program in one of two ways.
Casey:
As mentioned on the show, on Edit Mode, the dot-dot-dot button has a list of apps that support editing in Photos.
Casey:
But you can also right-click the photo and choose Edit With, which has a shortcut Command Return for Last Used App,
Casey:
This will open the photo, usually in TIFF format, in that app, and save the edited photo back to your library when you're done.
Casey:
Any app that can open photos can be used this way.
Casey:
In all cases, you can never modify or lose the original.
Casey:
Photos always retains the original image.
Casey:
On the show, you referred to the flatten option in Pixelmator Pro.
Casey:
If you choose flatten, then the resulting image is flattened and saved back to your library as the current edit.
Casey:
If you choose to preserve edits, then Photos retains additional metadata so that it can restore the editing session if you bring Pixelmator Pro's extension back up within Photos.
Casey:
Whether you have the ability to finally adjust edits or not, the revert to original button is always present in the editing session if the current photo has ever been modified.
John:
Yeah, that was the distinction I missed that that it's there's no way to lose the original, but the preserve edits preserves them.
John:
So if you go back to the editor, like your I guess your layers or whatever the hell you did in the editor, that is preserved.
John:
I always do the preserve thing, so I didn't actually know what the flattened it and what the distinction was.
John:
But it's good to know that no matter what I pick, it's never going to mess with my original photo.
Casey:
And then also from Ezekiel, Ellen, with regard to Elin, Ellen, I don't know, with regard to dumb TVs, I have a TCL Roku TV and I keep it disconnected from the Internet.
Casey:
When you do this, an LED flashes forever until it's reconnected.
Casey:
I used a pair of flyers to remove the LED from the circuit board.
Casey:
It's a perfectly good, cheap 4K TV.
John:
I mean, I thought this was going to go, I put a piece of tape over it, but sure, pliers.
John:
I put this in here just to show how aggressive these companies are getting about insisting you're on the internet.
John:
Like a hardware thing with a light flashing your face that you can't disable is...
John:
pretty severe i mean i guess the next phase is like some giant dialogue in the middle of your television that doesn't go away until you connect to the internet but i suppose if someone's like watching uh something on a broadcast television over the air or watching a plastic disc spinning somewhere and they lose internet connection and they can't watch tv they're gonna be pretty angry yep
Casey:
And then finally, Apple TV, Apple TV Plus, excuse me, Disney Plus and games.
John:
Let me tackle this one before you go into it, because this is something that we we talked about on the show where we talked about Disney.
John:
And I I put it in there specifically to remind myself to make a particular point.
John:
And I didn't make it.
John:
I made a bunch of other points, which I also wanted to make.
John:
But I missed this one.
John:
um this was the aaron thomas question that was like you know sony and nintendo have good relationships with game developers what can apple and google learn from them and it's related to the disney thing in a bunch of ways but the final way that i want to mention is we're talking about like apple keeping its hands off stuff like apple keeping its hands off beats and whether or not they're doing that uh apple keeping its hands off uh the people who make the apple tv plus shows and not telling them that they can't have nudity or violence and stuff like that despite the rumors so
John:
I think there is something to the idea that Apple's ability to keep its hands off.
John:
And this sounds so weird because obviously these things are part of Apple, like Apple TV plus the studio is part of Apple and Beats is part of Apple.
John:
But like when I tell you Apple, I'm talking about like the Apple that acquired those companies.
John:
So that Apple, the core Apple, the Apple that does computer products.
Casey:
The Apple core.
John:
Yeah, there you go.
John:
Like that part.
John:
Can it keep its hands off when it acquires a business that does something that it previously didn't have expertise in?
John:
Or even when it grows one organically, we're going to start our own television and movie studios.
John:
We have no expertise in this.
John:
We've never done it before, but we're going to hire a bunch of people.
John:
They're going to be part of Apple, but we're going to let them do what they know how to do because we know that we don't know how to do it and we shouldn't mess with them and we'll give them guidance and some direction, but mostly let them do what they want versus buying something like Beats where it's like, well, we make headphones.
John:
We'll talk to them a little bit or whatever.
John:
I think Apple is much better able to keep its hands off stuff
John:
when it is far away from things that it does.
John:
And I think that's part of its big problem with games.
John:
Getting to Aaron's question, why are they so bad at games?
John:
Why did Nintendo and Sony have good relationships with developers?
John:
Why does Apple and Google not?
John:
I can't speak to Google right now, but Apple, I think the reason Apple and games gets messed up is because Apple and gaming
John:
impacts directly in all of Apple's core businesses.
John:
The Mac, the phone, the Apple TV.
John:
It's like, Apple's like, well, we know about that stuff.
John:
We're Apple.
John:
Of course we know about making Macs.
John:
And we know about making operating systems and we know about GPUs and all that stuff.
John:
And
John:
They feel like they have expertise in that area.
John:
So to the extent that there is any overlap between what you need to do to be good at games and existing Apple business and technologies that Apple thinks it already knows, there is conflict.
John:
And that, I think, is a big reason why Apple has such problems with games, because games touch so many parts of their business.
John:
And Apple says...
John:
don't now don't tell us what to do we know how to do this don't tell us that we should have uh you know nvidia gpus or external gpus at all we know what we're doing we know what's right for this business don't tell us that we need open jail and operating system or vulcan we don't need that we're going to do metal like there is so much entrenched expertise and knowledge and experience related to gaming related stuff inside apple that it's very difficult for apple to grow organically or allowed to come in from the outside people who have different ideas and say well you know
John:
here's how Microsoft does it and how they interface with game developers.
John:
And it seems to work better for them because look at all the games on their platforms and they have a console and so on and so forth.
John:
And here's how, you know, other companies interface with Sony.
John:
And we brought in these people from Activision or whatever, and they're telling us, well, if you want to do well in the game industry, you got X, Y, and Z. And that runs right up against Apple folks saying, I've been, you know, working on the Mac for 25 years and you're not going to tell me what I need to do to my hardware or software platform to do better for gaming.
John:
Um,
John:
And that's why I think that's related to this question.
John:
That's part of the reason that Apple has such trouble with games.
John:
It just overlaps too much.
John:
Whereas Disney, I would imagine theme parks does not overlap too much.
John:
Although Apple might say, we know how to make spaces for humans.
John:
Look at Apple Park.
John:
It's perfect, except for the Rubbermaid garbage cans.
Marco:
Consider becoming an ATP member today.
Marco:
ATP membership gets all sorts of fun little goodies, but the big two are the ad-free feed and bonus content.
Marco:
So here's what you get, the ad-free version of the show.
Marco:
You don't hear messages like this or other sponsorships, and instead you get an ad-free feed that you can add to whatever podcast player you want to use.
Marco:
It's a URL unique to you, so you can just do whatever you want with it.
Marco:
Listen anywhere you want.
Marco:
Of course, I have my opinion, but
Marco:
You can listen to any player you want that supports URLs, which is most of them.
Marco:
So anyway, that's the big one.
Marco:
You get an ad-free version of the show.
Marco:
You also get whatever kind of member special content we decide to release.
Marco:
Usually this is about maybe once a month or so.
Marco:
We'll do some kind of member special.
Marco:
And so we've done things like movie reviews.
Marco:
We've taste tested food on the air.
Marco:
We've most recently, we did two tier lists, a tier list ranking every iPhone to date.
Marco:
And just this week, a tier list ranking every iMac to date.
Marco:
So there's member exclusive content and the ad free feed.
Marco:
Those are the big ones.
Marco:
And it's just a great way to support the show.
Marco:
There are other smaller perks as well.
Marco:
I'll get to those later in the show.
Marco:
But basically, that's what you're mostly paying to support the show.
Marco:
And you get the ad free feed and member exclusive content.
Marco:
It's a bunch of fun.
Marco:
So see for yourself.
Marco:
It's just eight bucks a month at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you so much for considering being a member today.
Marco:
And we really hope you check it out atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you so much.
Casey:
We talked a few episodes ago, I don't recall exactly when, about Marco's quest to get better security cameras.
Casey:
And I guess the quick summary was you had, what did you have that was constantly failing, Marco?
Marco:
I had the Logitech Circle View HomeKit Secure Video Cameras.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
And I've used them for about two years.
Marco:
They would just constantly fall off the network and were constantly not connected or would have long delays and then fail to connect or whatever else.
Marco:
So since talking about this, we got a ton of recommendations for Ubiquiti cameras and also a ton of people saying, I also have Logitech Circle View and it has the same problem for me.
Marco:
So that was very vindicating that it isn't just me, that everyone's Logitech Circle Views kind of suck.
Marco:
And that was kind of the story with almost every consumer grade Wi-Fi camera that we heard about.
Marco:
everyone basically said the same thing the um the eufy cameras seem to be a little more reliable for in people's reports but still not super reliable and everyone kept telling me the exact same thing first of all because i had asked about ubiquity stuff because i already have ubiquity networking gear and i like it a lot and so i had asked you know i knew they had cameras i asked people if they were any good everyone said yes so
Marco:
And everyone also wrote in to basically say pretty much any power over Ethernet wired camera is very good compared to Wi-Fi cameras.
Marco:
And so you don't have to necessarily go ubiquity.
Marco:
There's all sorts of PoE cameras that you, as long as you can run Ethernet wiring to where you have to be and you have a PoE supplying switch or injectors, you know, of some kind, then that's the way to go.
Marco:
Everyone told me that.
Marco:
So, of course, I bought a bunch of ubiquity stuff because that's,
Marco:
That's my standard operating procedure.
Marco:
Quick review of how this went.
Marco:
In short, extremely well.
Marco:
I've been using the Ubiquiti and Unify Protect setup now for, I think, about three weeks.
Marco:
It has been awesome.
Marco:
So first of all, a couple of drawbacks.
Marco:
This whole thing is super expensive.
Marco:
This is the pro level thing.
Marco:
A while ago, I was trying to help out my town with their meetings.
Marco:
I talked about it very briefly on the show with the microphone equipment they should use for meetings.
Marco:
I was recommending, based on my limited experience with wireless mics, I was recommending a pro grade Shure, the SLX-D wireless system.
Marco:
Because I had used some of the lower-end consumer-y kind of stuff before.
Marco:
It would always have static or dropouts.
Marco:
It was using 2.4 gigahertz instead of some of the UHF frequencies.
Marco:
And I'd run into all the limitations of consumer-grade gear in wireless mics.
Marco:
You get the better stuff.
Marco:
It will not drop out.
Marco:
It will not have static.
Marco:
It will just work.
Marco:
And it has just worked.
Marco:
It has been perfect.
Marco:
It has been flawless.
Marco:
There has not been a single dropout.
Marco:
There is not even a blip of static ever.
Marco:
They just work.
Marco:
That's what you pay for when you get pro gear.
Marco:
Pro gear, when you're using a microphone or a camera or whatever, when you're using this stuff professionally, similar with computer gear too, when you're using this stuff professionally, you can't afford to have it not work.
Marco:
If it doesn't work, bad stuff happens.
Marco:
You have to reshoot a scene or some high stakes thing gets ruined or gets messed up or you look bad because you're trying to be professional and then you show up with amateur gear or whatever.
Marco:
You need it to work 100% of the time.
Marco:
In the camera business, Wi-Fi cameras are the consumer level gear.
Marco:
They are inexpensive.
Marco:
If you don't have super high needs, and especially if you're price sensitive, they're a great option.
Marco:
But they kind of suck.
Marco:
And, you know, you kind of get what you pay for.
Marco:
And now that I've used PoE cameras, no question, this is the pro gear.
Marco:
And that's why the setup costs more.
Marco:
And that's why it has, you know, a little bit higher startup requirements.
Marco:
It's the pro system.
Marco:
And when you want it to work 100% of the time or very, very close to that...
Marco:
That's what you go for.
Marco:
You go for wired Ethernet supplying power and data over a cable, no Wi-Fi.
Marco:
And, you know, these are like, you know, heavy duty, you know, materials and enclosures and everything.
Marco:
It's pro gear to get started with a ubiquity camera system.
Marco:
You need something that acts as the video recorder.
Marco:
They have a few pieces of equipment you can do this with.
Marco:
I went with the small version of their NVR, the network video recorder.
Marco:
They have one that has like a whole bunch of bays.
Marco:
I went with the one that only has four bays because it was a lot cheaper and I don't need any more than that.
Marco:
A couple of little drawbacks here.
Marco:
It's a few hundred bucks.
Marco:
A couple of little drawbacks.
Marco:
It has four hard drive bays, but it does not, as far as you can tell, does not let you configure the RAID.
Marco:
It just automatically does it.
Marco:
So I bought two hard drives thinking I would run them in RAID 0, basically, because this data is not super important that I'm worried about a hard drive crash, like erasing last week's footage.
Marco:
It isn't that important that I need to keep it.
Marco:
So I was thinking to maximize space and retention time, I'd put two disks in it.
Marco:
Little did I know that two disks in the Ubiquiti MVR will always and only be configured as RAID 1.
Marco:
So I only had the space of one of them.
Marco:
So they're only redundant.
Marco:
And there's no way to make it use two disks as all their space.
Marco:
If you only have two disks in there, it does RAID 1.
Marco:
If you add any more, it does RAID 5.
John:
How did you not immediately buy a third disk?
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Because you're Marco.
Marco:
I decided, all right, you know what?
Marco:
This is fine.
Marco:
Whatever.
John:
All right.
John:
Start the clock on that third hard drive, everybody.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Secondly, when you get into Ubiquiti stuff, they have all these Unify apps.
Marco:
And my main router is the original Unify Dream Machine, which doesn't support network video functionality directly.
Marco:
I thought that by adding an NVR to my network here, I thought that it would integrate better into the Dream Machine.
Marco:
So I would have all my like Unify apps in one screen.
Marco:
It doesn't.
Marco:
You just have to access the NVR via its IP address.
Marco:
Like that's how you access its web interface.
Marco:
It's just the IP, you know, the one and two dot whatever.
Marco:
What I probably should have done is I discussed that for the new house, I got the UDM SE, the Dream Machine SE that has the hard drive bay in it and integrates its functionality into the router.
Marco:
I probably should have gotten that for here too.
Marco:
I didn't.
Marco:
Oh, well, because that would have actually integrated it all into one interface.
Marco:
But I already had the Dream Machine here.
Marco:
And so this was cheaper, easier, et cetera.
Marco:
Anyway, it's been working fine.
Marco:
So moving on from the NVR.
Marco:
But if you are doing a new setup, I would get a Dream Machine router that has built-in storage.
Marco:
The new ones either have little SSDs or the big hard drive bay.
Marco:
I would just do that.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
The cameras I got were mostly the G5 bullet.
Marco:
This seemed somewhat comparable in like, you know, price and quality to the circle view.
Marco:
Some downsides of the G5 bullet camera compared to the circle view.
Marco:
It has a much narrower field of view.
Marco:
So the circle view has an, I think it's officially a 180 degree view.
Marco:
That's why they call it circle view.
Marco:
Or at least it's very close to 180 degrees.
Marco:
That would be a half a circle though.
Marco:
Well, that's true.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, the camera's round at least.
Marco:
uh speaking of the g5 camera i know a lot of people wrote in and said oh even though the g5 is newer you should get the g4 and i don't remember the reason was like less glare or was it also a field of view thing no the reason why the reason people cited was that apparently the g5s were mostly a response to covid supply chain shortages where they kind of simplified the camera and they they actually made it cheaper they they downgraded some things like from metal to plastic um
Marco:
I don't know too many details because I decided, you know what, for my purposes, I'd rather get the cheaper ones.
Marco:
It's not like you live in a harsh environment.
Marco:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, yeah.
Marco:
So I went for the newer, cheaper models because for my purposes, I wanted to have a few of them and it started to add up if I went to the old ones.
John:
Margo's kink is putting electronic devices outside that aren't equipped to deal with the weather.
John:
And if he can't put indoor stuff outdoor, he's going to buy the cheapest outdoor stuff he can.
John:
Sounds right.
John:
G5 versus G4.
John:
One of them says it's built more sturdily and the other one is decontented.
John:
Ooh, I get a thrill from putting the decontented one out there.
John:
Oh my God.
John:
That's amazing.
John:
I really want to see the picture of what the G5s look like after a year.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Set one of your long-term reminders.
Marco:
Ask me in a year.
Marco:
Anyway, all right.
Marco:
So compared to the Logitech, narrower field of view on the G5 bullet, which is it depends where you're putting it.
Marco:
That could be a plus or a minus.
Marco:
I have found with the Logitech, with the ultra wide view of the Logitechs, you do see more area, but it's kind of like the problem with the center stage cameras in the, you know, the recent cinema display and recent iPads.
Marco:
You can have an ultra wide lens and just kind of crop in when you need to see something further in.
Marco:
But that comes at a pretty significant loss in detail.
Marco:
And so it's a trade-off.
Marco:
I had one spot where I kind of missed the wider angle.
Marco:
In all the other spots I put them, I enjoyed the increased detail better.
Marco:
So anyway, it's a trade-off.
Marco:
The Ubiquiti cameras are also substantially larger and I would say uglier, but that also makes them more visible.
Marco:
One of the most important roles that one of these cameras serves is to be visible so that people who are trying to walk under my house to pee under it see the camera and maybe get deterred from peeing there.
Marco:
I've found the Logitech circle views are so small and discreet.
Marco:
that a lot of times people would walk right past it at eye level and not see it.
John:
Marco's house is on stilts, by the way.
John:
I really do wonder what people are thinking.
John:
Like, people walk onto your house to pee?
Marco:
What?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
John:
It's very high up in the air.
Marco:
Yes, it's near the water, so it's on piles.
Marco:
Anyway, the ubiquity cameras are much more visible.
Marco:
And so for my purposes, actually, that's good.
Marco:
Like, if you want it to be discreet, don't go with these.
Marco:
But if you want them to actually be visible, to be some kind of deterrent to people or whatever,
Marco:
it's actually an upgrade you could have a big googly eyes on them you can get those real cheap they'll hold up to the salt weather just giant googly eyes oh yeah cheap adhesives on the back of something made of paper that'll do great yeah you got you had to tie it there with a rusty piece of wire yeah exactly uh anyway i would say the image quality quality is very good a little bit better than the circle view um and of course you know the narrower field of view helps certain things as well
Marco:
But mostly what I have loved about the G5 and all the ubiquity cameras is that they are far more customizable and tweakable for things like activity zones.
Marco:
So you can like draw out, you can load the image in the app and then you can draw out, all right, only report performance.
Marco:
person detection in this area and you draw like a polygon of what part of the picture you want to report and you can you can define multiple zones you can set their sensitivity like as a percentage so if you find like you're getting like too many false positives because like your bike seat looks like a person in certain lighting yes that happened to me um you can just turn that down a little bit like turn sensitivity down to like oh defaults 50 make it 30 and you can tweak a lot about it and i found with home kit secure video
Marco:
I have found those settings oftentimes don't stick, or after a while, they reset themselves.
Marco:
I don't know why.
Marco:
It's infuriating.
Marco:
Because one of these cameras I have pointing, basically, the street in front of my house is in the field of view of one of these cameras, where the circle view used to be.
Marco:
And I want person detection on the part that's close to my house, but...
Marco:
Sometimes the Logitech would just forget that setting and would start reporting every single person that walked by on the street, which is not helpful.
Marco:
This was a problem with so many settings for the Logitechs.
Marco:
I would tell them, for instance, stop notifying me every time you disconnect and go offline.
Marco:
And it would remember that for a few days and then forget.
Marco:
And then it would start notifying me every time it went offline.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
That was a constant battle with the HomeKit cameras.
Marco:
It just keeps forgetting my settings or resetting my settings for no apparent reason.
Marco:
So far, the Ubiquiti system has never forgotten a setting.
Marco:
You set it and forget it.
Marco:
You set it and it just remembers.
Marco:
Like, it should.
Marco:
Why is that not even table stakes?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
And to run a bit of a test on the smarts of these cameras and the speed of these cameras...
Marco:
I've kept one circle view camera in use.
Marco:
The one by the bikes.
Marco:
Because this is the one, every time we leave or come back, we're usually on a bike because it's a bike town, and every time we leave or come back, this camera alerts me so I get a tap-tap on my watch when I or anyone else pulls into the bike area.
Marco:
And it's like, oh, hey, TIFF's home.
Marco:
You know, it's great.
Marco:
That circle view, because it's right next to a wireless access point, that circle view has been the most reliable.
Marco:
And it's been the most useful because I love that utility.
Marco:
So I wanted to see, you know, one of the advantages of HomeKit is that almost everything about it runs locally on your network.
Marco:
So notifications and responses to things tend to be very fast with HomeKit.
Marco:
Again, that's one of the best things about it.
Marco:
This should, in theory, be as fast because it is also mostly on my network.
Marco:
But I figured, well, to send a notification, they have to upload the picture to some service somewhere so that the notification can have access to that image from Apple's notification service to show it on the watch or on the phone or whatever.
Marco:
So I figured maybe it'll be slower.
Marco:
And I wanted to also test how smart is the object and person recognition.
Marco:
is it smarter than logitech is it dumber is it slower is it faster so for these three weeks i've been running both the logitech and and ubiquity g5 bullet in the bike area the speed has been nearly identical they're they're always within you know like occasionally one will come in before the other or the other one or it'll flip around the order that they come in but they're basically exactly as fast so that's great
Marco:
They also are about as smart or smarter.
Marco:
Occasionally, the Logitech will report a spider web moving in front of it as a person.
Marco:
So far, the Ubiquiti cameras have never done stupid stuff like that.
Marco:
It did.
Marco:
Again, it did think my bike seat was a person for a while.
Marco:
So I just adjusted that sensitivity and that fixed that problem.
Marco:
Neither one has ever missed a person.
Marco:
When I lowered the sensitivity for the bike area to get rid of the bike seat issue, it didn't start missing people.
Marco:
It's recognizing us every single time.
Marco:
So it's exactly as good for that, if not better.
Marco:
All the detection, the person detection, it's all wonderful.
Marco:
One thing it does not have, the HomeKit notifications, if you long press them on the phone screen or whatever, it would actually play the video clip
Marco:
These don't do that.
Marco:
These you have to tap and load the app.
Marco:
Like they'll show you the picture, but you have to tap and actually view it in their app to see the actual video clip.
Marco:
But with HomeKit, that was not only unreliable, but slow.
Marco:
A lot of times you'd be waiting a long time for that clip to load or it would never load.
Marco:
With the Ubiquiti cameras, those clips load immediately every single time, whether you are on your network or not.
Marco:
So there have been times during this time where we've been out of town, driving box trucks, and I was able to see the notifications and load the video clips and see the guys peeing on my house exactly as quickly or in most cases way faster, even though this was then streaming from my own network to the internet rather than coming from HomeKit's secure video servers or anything like that.
Marco:
So
Marco:
The speed of everything is great.
Marco:
And then trying to skim through the timeline using the Unify Protect app is so much faster and more reliable than trying to skim through the timeline of HomeKit stuff.
Marco:
And of course, as I mentioned last time, this has the advantage of 24-7 recording if you want it to, which for some of these I do.
Marco:
HomeKit secure video is only ever motion event based.
Marco:
There is no option in HomeKit for continuous recording.
Marco:
With this, you have that option.
Marco:
So I have a few cameras doing continuous recording.
Marco:
And it is just so fast and so easy and so reliable.
Marco:
It's awesome.
Marco:
As for the physical setup of them, power over Ethernet is...
Marco:
Awesome.
Marco:
This is something I already knew from Wi-Fi access points and stuff, but it continues to be awesome.
Marco:
Running the Logitech cameras, I had to have some kind of power outlet situation for them to supply them with their USB power somewhere within 15 feet of each camera.
Marco:
And because they're all outside...
Marco:
That involved some logistics like running extension cords in weird places, having those like out those outdoor like closed up ceiling boxes around a power strip or something to keep the weather out, John.
Marco:
So there was a whole bunch of like just kind of cruft that when I went to POE for these cameras, I could just get rid of all that stuff because I could just have these all going into my utility closet and then just run a long cable.
Marco:
like a long ethernet cable and that that carries power and data for these so i didn't i got we got to get rid of all those power adapters all those extension cords all those usb power bricks all those outdoor weather enclosures got rid of all of them so it's a way nicer and cleaner setup how are you feeling about the weather ceiling on where it plugs into the cameras
Marco:
For these to be perfectly weather-sealed, you have to either use a mounting box that itself is sealed, or you can use the mounts they come with, but they have a little rubber gasket in the mount, and it is not wide enough to fit an Ethernet cable end through.
Marco:
I think the idea is you're supposed to just run bare wire and then splice your own end on.
Marco:
That's right, yeah.
Marco:
Professionals don't buy pre-made cables.
Yeah.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But I do because I've tried making my own cables and I can't do it.
Marco:
Believe me, I've tried.
John:
So what did you do?
John:
You just plugged it in without the ceiling thing?
Marco:
Yeah, I just popped the ceiling thing out.
Marco:
And then I used I used dielectric grease around, you know, some of the main connectors.
Marco:
All right.
John:
I was going to ask because a lot of people send us things like, oh, here's what you do for outdoor connections.
John:
And it's like you pack the thing with gel or some other.
John:
That's what I keep the air out, essentially.
John:
Yeah, that's what I did.
John:
I did put that long term reminder in for a year from now, by the way, because I can't wait to see what these connections look like.
John:
RJ44 plus dielectric grease plus ocean air.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
RJ45, sorry.
Marco:
And otherwise, the only other thing I would say is this did require me to buy a couple more switches, a couple more PoE switches.
Marco:
Ubiquiti has this one called the Switch Flex, which seems to be basically made for this purpose.
Marco:
It's an indoor-outdoor compatible switch.
Marco:
and it has PoE kind of pass-through on all the ports.
Marco:
I did have to buy some of the really big 60-watt PoE injectors at the other end of those so that the switches could have enough power to spread around.
Marco:
The cameras use a few watts each, so if you're looking into this...
Marco:
budget and plan for possibly some switch upgrades or some power injectors somewhere along the way otherwise i'm super happy with this setup it is so nerdy and it is a hundred percent reliable so far and i just like look again because because we're in the middle of like moving selling a house we have a lot going on in our life right now um it's it's fine you know we're good but it's just it's very very busy
Marco:
And to take something that is super unreliable and irritating and full of paper cuts and to just make it super reliable and just take all those problems away from your life is incredibly satisfying and incredibly valuable, depending on what your life has in it right now.
Marco:
And this is one thing where I had this unreliable system that was driving me nuts, and now it's gone.
Marco:
And in place of it is something that just works super well.
Marco:
Did you end up using scripted?
Marco:
No, I'm not, actually.
Marco:
So Scripted was the app that everyone recommended that allows you to basically bridge any other camera system, including PoE cameras, including Ubiquiti stuff.
Marco:
It allows you to bridge those into HomeKit Secure Video.
Marco:
I thought I would set that up on something.
Marco:
But first of all, I don't have any spare hardware to run it on right now.
Marco:
And I would be like, oh, should I buy the low-end Mac Mini or some kind of high-end Raspberry Pi or Intel NUC thing?
Marco:
And I realized, first of all, as previously spoken, I don't have time for this crap right now.
Marco:
And second of all, I don't want to run one of these things just for this.
Marco:
And then third of all, I realized I don't think I actually need it for anything.
Marco:
The only major advantage that would provide me is integrations with features that I don't really use.
Marco:
Like, you know, yes, it turns your other camera system into something that can, for instance, show the person at the door on your Apple TV.
Marco:
Well, I don't do that.
Marco:
I don't use that feature.
Marco:
So I don't really need that.
Marco:
The other thing is it would allow you to have an off-site record of motion events.
Marco:
That is valuable.
Marco:
And at some point, I might look into it for that.
Marco:
So that way, like, you know, in case a hurricane destroys my house, I'll be able to see the video clips up to that point that contain motion.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
I mean, I don't know how actionable that is, but it might be, you know, it might be worth having at some point.
Marco:
But for now, the value is just not there.
Marco:
I'm just not having these cameras in HomeKit and it's fine.
you
Casey:
You couldn't just put a Docker container on your Synology?
Casey:
I know this is anathema to you, or however you pronounce the word.
Casey:
I think it's anathema.
Casey:
Anathema, there we go, sorry.
Casey:
It's one of those ones like Bazel that I've only ever read and never pronounced.
Casey:
Anyways, the point is, I know that you are allergic, how about that, to Docker and anything like it, but this really is the sort of thing that if you were to accept help from another human being, hello, I'm that person, I could get you set up with this, assuming there is a Docker container for scripted, which I
Casey:
would assume there is uh then it would be minutes to get this squared away like i cannot i cannot speak highly enough how quickly you could get that running on say your synology leaving aside like surveillance station or any of that but you could get that running so fast if you were willing to accept 10 minutes of help getting the docker container isn't the hard part i think it's setting up scripted with the cameras the way he wants it to be that's fair making sure it doesn't anger them and you know i understand his desire not to over complicate it if things are finally working
Marco:
Well, also, like, you know, look, there's all sorts of things.
Marco:
There's, you know, stuff like Homebridge.
Marco:
Like, there's all these wonderful, you know, apps that are made to connect different smart home things to different systems.
Marco:
And that's great.
Marco:
I'm not in a point in my life where I want to add complexity like that to my setup.
Marco:
For me, like, I'd rather just have, I'd rather just use the products directly.
Marco:
And to add something like that to my setup, it's a very optimistic thing thinking I'll just set this up and then these things will be bridged forever.
Marco:
And that's never how it really works.
Marco:
You know, always in practice, you have some kind of hack or bridge like that.
Marco:
Every few months you got to reset it or reconfigure it or, you know, figure out why something's not working.
Marco:
And then you have a whole other thing to debug or run or operate.
Marco:
Those Docker containers will eventually need to be updated or will eventually break or something like that.
Casey:
And it just, but that's incredibly easy.
Casey:
But I do agree with what you're saying in principle, but it is so easy.
It,
Marco:
Yeah, but that's it's just that adds more stuff to my plate.
Marco:
And I'm like, I don't, you know, is this additional integration or feature really worth that level of tinkering and maintenance?
Marco:
And to me, oftentimes the answer is no.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, you're allowed.
Casey:
It doesn't make you wrong.
Casey:
I just, I cannot overstate how easy this could potentially be if you were interested in it.
Casey:
And it sounds like you're just plain not interested, and that's okay.
John:
I remember how excited you are about the Logitech CircleView camera.
John:
So we may be in the honeymoon period.
John:
And related to that, we got one bit of very adamant feedback from John McMichael, who said...
John:
ubiquity video cameras is hot garbage ubiquity video camera singular is hot garbage uh get yourself some lorex cameras l-o-r-e-x and tie them into security spy and i believe i found the correct link for security spy security spy looks like the type if you have like an apartment building and you want to have like a station where there's a security guard looking at a bunch of cameras that's what it looks like but it's for the mac looks like an impressive piece of software but i'm guessing this is not what marco wants
Marco:
And that too, I didn't want to run a Mac server.
Marco:
Because again, what I have now, I have this Ubiquiti appliance, basically, the NVR doing the recording and everything.
Marco:
I know Ubiquiti gear.
Marco:
I know I can just let that run for years and never touch it, never update it, never have to worry about, is something going to break?
Marco:
Something never falls out of configuration.
Marco:
Right now, I don't run a Mac server at home for any reason.
Marco:
and i'm okay with that where's the nvr is the nvr on the water closet uh okay the water is on the floor it is far it's it's up well it i mean closets it's like five feet above any water the idea of a server closet is a term of art but like literal closets and houses tend not to have great ventilation i do have some concern about the number oh no that no it's a it's a utility closet so it is ventilated like that's it's where i it's where i have other networking gear
Marco:
it's it's fine all right well so when you open the door you don't feel a blast of hot air come out at you no no it's it's actually partially conditioned the way the house is okay um so like you know right like when the air conditioning is on you open the door and you get a blast of cold air um so it's yes we know water closet is a term for bathroom that's not what we mean we're aware see past episodes it's complicated
Marco:
It's really not.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, this system, look, if you're a nerd, this is awesome.
Marco:
If you are, if you, if you're looking for like a basic, easy to set up, inexpensive, compact home security camera system, this is not that.
Marco:
But if you want something that's really good, like high, high end needs, or just you want something that works really well and you're willing to probably spend more than you reasonably responsibly should and have all this gear somewhere in your closet somewhere, then this is awesome.
Marco:
This doesn't make sense for most people, but if it makes sense for you, it's really awesome.
Marco:
Please consider becoming an ATP member today.
Marco:
So I told you earlier, membership gets you the ad-free version of the show and occasional member-exclusive bonus content.
Marco:
Those are great reasons to support the show.
Marco:
Also, the most popular possibly thing that we give with membership, a very popular option among our members, is the bootleg feed.
Marco:
people love this thing.
Marco:
So the bootleg is the unedited live broadcast of the show.
Marco:
We publish it right after the live broadcast finishes.
Marco:
So what this means is it is totally raw, totally unedited.
Marco:
You hear all the bad jokes that didn't land.
Marco:
You hear Casey swearing.
Marco:
You hear me, you know, missing the timing of the viper slap that I later move up and post.
Marco:
Like you hear all that stuff.
Marco:
You hear us are a little kind of
Marco:
bumper discussions, the beginning and end of the show where that might be cut off from the release version because it doesn't really make sense or fit in the time that I want.
Marco:
So you get all sorts of little bonus stuff, and it's very raw, and it's released right after the recording ends.
Marco:
So this is usually about 12 to 18 hours before the actual official release of the show.
Marco:
So you get an earlier release and all the unedited glory of the show.
Marco:
That's the bootleg.
Marco:
That joins the ad-free feed, the member bonus content here and there,
Marco:
And you occasionally get other little perks as well.
Marco:
Things like discounts on merchandise whenever we have a merchandise sales and occasional little test flight links to our various app betas if we have those or things like that.
Marco:
But those are the big ones.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
It is just $8 a month.
Marco:
We have a few different currencies available.
Marco:
If it's more convenient for you to be charged in a different currency, we have a few options there.
Marco:
We have monthly or annual plans, depending on how you want to be charged that way.
Marco:
So we got you covered.
Marco:
ATP.FM slash join.
Marco:
Please consider becoming a member today.
Marco:
Thank you so much.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Greg writes, how do you handle getting your kids their first email address?
Casey:
What do you plan to do or did you do about setting them up?
Casey:
Did you use junior at smithfamily.com or from your custom domain?
Casey:
Did you set them down in front of Gmail and let them choose their own laser blaster 4567 at gmail.com?
Casey:
Wait until their school assigns them student1234 at school.org.
Casey:
When did you decide to do it?
Casey:
Did you reserve them a Gmail address as soon as you had a name picked out?
Casey:
As tech-savvy parents, it feels like we are likely to have our own opinions about the right answer based on our own experiences and values, i.e.
Casey:
avoiding something that you'll likely feel differently about when applying for jobs, or relying on a student or ISP email address that is more fragile than iCloud or Gmail.
Casey:
But I'm curious how you approached it in partnership with your youngsters, given that ultimately, they're the ones that own this address and it will come to represent them, not you.
Casey:
I think I signed Declan up for a Gmail account because at the time it seemed like a good idea, but I don't think I needed to, and neither of my children have an email address at the moment.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Marco, you are the next oldest child.
Casey:
What did you guys do?
Marco:
Our kid has a Google ID.
Marco:
mainly so that we could share like the youtube no ads thing like the family plan for youtube no ads whatever that's called this year um we you know we once he was watching youtube we wanted to get him that because we didn't want him wasting time watching all these bs ads on youtube so anyway um so we had to get him a google id for that um we had to later create a second one because we accidentally put in his real age
Marco:
on that one and it wouldn't let him because he was under age 13 it wouldn't let him watch anything on YouTube basically and so we had to then create a fake second child with a fake second Google ID who is older and he stays logged in as that most of the time but anyway he doesn't really use email for anything so he has these email addresses that are both Gmail addresses
Marco:
What does he use email for?
Marco:
He is 11.
Marco:
He's fine.
Marco:
He's not dealing with, got to go through my inbox every morning from my boss.
Marco:
It's not like that.
Marco:
At school, he does have an email address for school, but I don't see him using that for anything but school-related things.
Marco:
I think that's the way to do it.
Marco:
School email addresses are like work email addresses.
Marco:
Just that's the kid's job when they're in school.
Marco:
If you have a job, you probably have a work email address, but that's probably not the one you give your friends.
Marco:
That's probably not the one that you plan to have forever.
Marco:
And I consider school to be the same way.
Marco:
A school email address is something that you have as a functional purpose that you're required to have when you are in school to do things like submit papers to your teacher in school.
Marco:
But that is not a permanent email address.
Marco:
For a permanent email address, I say if your kid is young, don't worry about it.
Marco:
Maybe reserve a good name for them at Gmail or reserve a good domain name or ideally both because domain names are cheap and Gmail accounts are free.
Marco:
So yeah, reserve their name or some good version of it before someone else takes it.
Marco:
But don't make any assumptions that your kid is going to want, first of all, an email address at all.
Marco:
But second of all, don't make any assumptions that your kid is going to want this particular email address.
Marco:
Let them be a kid.
Marco:
Let them goof around with whatever they want to goof around with anywhere else.
Marco:
Down the road, when they're 60, if they don't have the emails they sent when they were nine, who cares?
Marco:
Let them be kids.
Marco:
Let them mess around with stuff that doesn't matter now.
Marco:
And down the road, when it comes time to make things more permanent,
Marco:
Do what parents are supposed to do.
Marco:
Guide them, but let them make the decision ultimately.
Marco:
You can tell them, you can give them wisdom that they will ignore.
Marco:
You can say like, you probably shouldn't have boner champ 69, you know, in your email address forever.
Marco:
You know, you can, you can guide them, but ultimately, you know, they're going to do their own thing once they're old enough to do it.
Marco:
And you can't have too much control over it or too much saying it.
Marco:
So, you know, don't put too much thought into it.
Casey:
John.
John:
Casey, do your kids not watch YouTube?
Casey:
Nope, not yet.
John:
Wow.
John:
You're really holding the line on that.
John:
But anyway, when they do, you're going to have to get them Google IDs, just like Marco.
John:
And then you'll have to figure out how to pay for the ad-free thing, which I believe I use an Android emulator to do.
John:
Wait, what?
John:
An Android emulator on my Mac, because at the time I got it, it was the only way you could pay for family, plan, YouTube, no ads, was from an Android device.
John:
So I...
John:
I think I still have like blue stacks or something.
John:
It was like an Android tablet emulator that I ran on my Mac so I can log into my existing Google ID to be able to get to the screen or let me pay for this.
John:
Anyway, they continue to bill me monthly for that.
John:
So it worked.
John:
I just do it on the website.
John:
I'm sure it's easier now, but remember this, I'm doing this back in the past.
John:
And I also don't remember what that program was called then or is called now.
John:
I just know that they bill me every month and it keeps getting more expensive, but it's worth every penny because you don't want to see YouTube ads.
John:
Yeah, that's true.
John:
So here's the complexity about this thing.
John:
So what I actually did is I tried to get all my kids reasonable Gmail addresses, mostly, again, like Margo was saying, because I didn't want them to ever see any ads on YouTube.
John:
Um, but even before that, I think I might've even got the things before that.
John:
I wanted to reserve them a name.
John:
Now, here's the deal.
John:
We always say on this program that, um, and I, it's best to have your own domain, uh, you know, buy a domain for yourself and keep it for your whole life and have your email address be something at the domain that you own and control.
John:
Uh, you can have that backed by all sorts of things.
John:
You could change, uh, you know, services that back it.
John:
You can use fast mail.
John:
You could have it forwarding to Gmail.
John:
You can do all sorts of stuff.
John:
But having a non-embarrassing email address for yourself that you control that's on your own domain is definitely the way you want to go.
John:
But I'm saying that to you as a listener of a tech podcast.
John:
The problem with doing that for your kid is what if they don't want to maintain a domain?
John:
And then they're going to be like, oh, who the heck controls smithfamily.com?
John:
Oh, that was dad.
John:
He was doing that.
John:
Oh, every account I've ever made in every service for my entire life is my name at smithfamily.com.
John:
And I have no idea how the heck smithfamily.com works.
John:
And now dad is dead.
John:
if your kids want to make their own domain for themselves and have bonerchamp69.com and have their email address like that that let them do that but you can't make a family domain that you control and force your kids to have an email address at it because then you're going to die and what if they don't want to deal with domains you'd be like oh
John:
oh, it's easy.
John:
Dealing with domains is easy.
John:
It's really easy to control.
John:
And fast mail setup is really like, you say that because you're listening to ATP, but your kid might not want to have anything to do with computers.
John:
So you can't actually, you know, oh, I'm just going to have a family domain because there's like, there's no continuity plan unless you have like a chain of younger relations who agree to continue to maintain smithfamily.com in perpetuity.
John:
Don't give your kids email addresses on that.
John:
Don't make them use it.
John:
And as for what kids need email for,
John:
I think for the foreseeable future, when you sign up for anything, it wants you to sign up with an email address.
John:
And right now it's email address and password.
John:
Maybe when our kids grow up, it'll be email address and pass key.
John:
But email address is the key to so much stuff.
John:
So I think it actually is important for your kids to have a canonical email address.
John:
So given that I say you should have it on your own domain, but you shouldn't force your kids to have one, but they're going to need an email address and they're probably going to need a Google ID.
John:
My advice is get a reasonable name at Gmail and have them use it.
John:
not with the expectation that it's going to be their email address for life because like marco said they'll pick their own email when they want and even if you give them like your kids name at gmail.com and like this is your official email address when they get to the age when they can pick just like they'll make a finsta and or like a you know phantom account they'll make
John:
their own secret stuff that you don't know about with their own names and that's just what kids do and that's perfectly fine but they're gonna need an email address and i think it's a nice thing to do as a parent to basically as soon as you have the name picked out uh reserve the name at gmail and use that for all their stuff and even before they can even talk sometimes you need to have an email address that's convenient to be theirs and not yours or whatever just don't expect they're going to use that email address their whole life because eventually they'll go off and do their own thing but they are going to need an email address and you know if like me you never want your children to have like digits in their name
John:
If you can help it, get them, you know, get get the name early.
John:
But a lot of Gmail ones are taken, which is rough.
John:
But you can probably if you combine their first and last name or first and middle name or initials or whatever, you can probably find something.
John:
Just don't use numbers.
John:
If they want to use numbers, they can.
John:
You can't stop them.
John:
But at least when you make their email addresses, you can do that.
John:
So and it's kind of a shame that I have to say this, that like, oh, the best thing to do is to have your own domain that you control.
John:
But you can't do that for your kids because you because you don't know whether they're going to be into computers.
John:
I wish it wasn't something that you needed to be even a little bit interested in computers to deal with.
John:
Again, it's not complicated.
John:
We all can do it really easily, right?
John:
Oh, fast mail is so easy.
John:
Or forwarding to Gmail is so easy.
John:
But mail delivery is more complicated than you think.
John:
And even the simplest things, even just...
John:
maintaining and continuing to pay for a domain name, which is nothing for people like us who amass them like candy and just have way too many domain names.
John:
If someone's not into computers in their future life, that's a burden to them and they're going to mess it up and it's going to cause problems if they're still using their email address.
Casey:
Michael writes, what is your expectation towards subscription apps?
Casey:
Do you expect new features and active development or should it just not break?
Casey:
I don't know if Marco or I is, well, not qualified, but in a position to genuinely answer.
Marco:
You have a subscription app, both of you.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Yeah, I know, but I have my opinions.
Casey:
I mean... That's what people are asking.
Casey:
Well...
Casey:
I feel like I'm deeply biased from the developer perspective, which is, hey, it hasn't broken.
Casey:
You should be happy.
Casey:
But from a user perspective, I'm not so sure that's quite so fair.
Casey:
I think it's tough, right?
Casey:
I think from a user perspective, I think something new at least once a year is a reasonable expectation.
Casey:
But again, it's hard.
Casey:
And from a developer's perspective, is the thing that I sold you, is that still working?
Casey:
Yes or no?
Casey:
If yes, then we have satisfied the contract.
Marco:
That's basically it, but it doesn't matter to me whether something is adding new stuff all the time.
Marco:
What matters to me is am I getting continued value from it?
Marco:
Now, that can mean a lot of things.
Marco:
As long as it is working for the reasons I went to pay for it in the first place, as long as that continues to function, I'm fine with it even if they don't add any more features.
Marco:
If I'm paying for working software and it continues to work, that's fine.
Marco:
Certainly, ideally, it would at least keep up with the environment around it.
Marco:
So, for instance, if it's an iOS app, Apple announces some new feature for the next OS.
Marco:
And I would expect within a reasonable amount of time after that feature launches, you know, after that OS launches, I would hope that the app would be updated to support it if it made a lot of sense for the app.
Marco:
So that's a lot of conditions.
Marco:
That's a lot of qualifiers, you know.
Marco:
But, you know, for instance, this year, iOS 17, big thing is interactive widgets.
Marco:
I would hope that an app that I'm paying an active subscription for, I would hope if it has a lot of value in widgets, and if there's a lot of value in those widgets becoming interactive for that app, for the actual role that it serves in my life, I would hope they would update to that within maybe six months of iOS coming out.
Marco:
ideally sooner but you know but meanwhile like if it's an app where widget doesn't really make a lot of sense i don't need them to do that so it all depends like what's going on in the environment around it i don't need new features just for the sake of new features but if the expectation of like software in this area you know if is moving this direction like you know for instance if they if the os gets redesigned you know apps look totally out of place and totally wrong until they update
Marco:
That's a shorter timeline expectation for that.
Marco:
If, for instance, when they launch dark mode, if your app doesn't support dark mode for a year after they launch dark mode like that, that kind of sucks.
Marco:
But for most apps, as long as what I originally paid for continues to work and they seem to reasonably fit into the surrounding ecosystem still, I'm fine with that.
John:
I think when people, if you ask people this question, especially tech nerdy type people, like academically, they might say, well, kind of what Marco said, like, you know, I don't expect too much, but you should add new features every once in a while and keep up with what the OS and the platform is doing.
John:
But it's one of those monkey paw wishes in that if you actually had an app that kept adding stuff, eventually...
John:
It craps up your app.
John:
Like there is a certain point where an app is, has not achieved perfection, but found the right middle point between having way too many features and way too few features.
John:
And that point is different for everybody, but you really don't want an app that just like pursues everything.
John:
Like for example, the thing was talking, Marco was talking about the interactive widgets.
John:
Oh, my app doesn't even have widgets, but I want to use interactive widgets, so I'm going to throw it in.
John:
And there's some new feature with ML, I'm going to throw that in.
John:
Eventually, it makes the app worse, not better.
John:
So if you happen to subscribe to an app that's been out for many years and kind of hit maturity, I don't think you should expect, nor should you want, constant new feature additions.
John:
Because maybe the feature set is pretty close to...
John:
like the right balance.
John:
And maybe you can adjust it.
John:
I wish that you had this feature and didn't have this one.
John:
And it can be sort of like oscillation around the center point.
John:
But constant addition of feature makes apps that are too crapped up.
John:
The flip side of that is if you get an app that...
John:
you know feels like it's gotten to that stable point but then never revisits that eventually you may be perfectly satisfied with app and keep paying for it but eventually say it's like five or ten years in and your friend has an app that does a similar job but it it like looks totally different it does a whole bunch of different stuff you may not realize that the competitive market has moved up around that thing and even though you were perfectly satisfied paying the subscription to that you didn't realize oh actually there's a new way to do this type of app that is better and this app hasn't kept up and it's time for me to jump ship and go elsewhere
John:
And those are all personal decisions, but I definitely do not expect nor want an app to constantly add new features to justify its subscription.
John:
What justifies its subscription is what Marco said.
John:
Does it still do the thing I want it to do in the way I want it to do it?
John:
uh and some people like eventually get to the point where they hate change so much that even if the entire competitive landscape around your app has moved on and they're all much better you still want to use the old one that works the way it did five years ago because that's what you're comfortable with and that's fine too so that's why it's different for every single person but yeah what i want from the app is continues working fixes any bugs uh and
John:
I continue to like it for the reasons I like it.
John:
And it's kind of the fear we have about an update.
John:
Oh, my favorite app just got updated.
John:
A lot of people get filled with dread.
John:
This is like, did they just change the whole interface?
John:
Did they remove a feature that I love?
John:
Did they add a new feature that they think is better but is worse for me?
John:
Updates are not always a positive.
John:
So I absolutely do not expect or want them to constantly add new features.
Casey:
And then finally, Dennis Chapovich writes, I've listened to multiple segments from you regarding backup strategies and password managers, but I never heard you talk about your approach to not losing access to your password manager.
Casey:
I'm asking this because I was recently on a trip in which my phone almost died, which would have caused me to lose access to all my passwords until I returned home.
Casey:
Do you have any specific strategy for having access to services which may be needed when you are not home?
Casey:
The first option is carry more than one device, or travel with more than one device.
Casey:
With that being said, I don't really have a good answer for this.
Casey:
I use 1Password, somewhat begrudgingly now.
Casey:
And so all of that stuff is synced with 1Password, and I can get to it via the web if necessary.
Casey:
But I don't have the super secret, like...
Casey:
It's not a GWID, but it's sort of kind of like a GWID.
Casey:
I don't have that memorized or anything like that.
Casey:
I don't have that in an easily accessible place if I was, you know, overseas or something like that.
Casey:
So I really don't have a good answer for this.
Casey:
I believe we've started with Marco the last couple of times.
Casey:
So, John, what's your answer?
John:
I mean, I think you're right.
John:
Like redundancy, you know, like if you really need to have access to it on the road, don't just bring one phone or, you know, because what if you drop it in a car runs over it or whatever, have...
John:
have multiple devices for it.
John:
In the broader sense, not losing access means all those things that people click through to get to what they wanted to do that says, oh, print out these backup codes and put them in a safe place.
John:
Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll do that later and you don't do it.
John:
That's a mistake.
John:
Do that.
John:
Print the backup codes, put them in a safety deposit box in a bank, right?
John:
Like,
John:
especially for the things that are the keys to the kingdom, like the things to access your main email account, which is what you register at all your accounts and all your other services with, so you can use the forgot my password thing or whatever.
John:
What if you lose all access to that?
John:
All your devices get wiped.
John:
Your house burns down.
John:
You don't have any devices with...
John:
uh one password or icloud keychain is just you know again the cloud sync ones you should still be able to get back by sending your apple id but whatever disaster strikes physical backup that's why those backup codes exist for for for your key accounts obviously not for everything but for like your key accounts make sure you actually do the thing they tell you to do which is to print out the backup codes and don't pin them to your refrigerator like
John:
You know, put them in an actual safe place somewhere.
John:
Have them off site if possible.
John:
If you have a safety deposit box at a bank, that's good.
John:
You could have them over a relative's house and they're safe or something, something like that.
John:
But that's that's broader than just travel travel.
John:
I think Casey nailed that, you know, redundancy more than one device.
Marco:
marco you know i also use one password um i i mean i use one password and apple icloud keychain which is still exactly as messy as it sounds i still have not resolved that but anyway um you know my one password you know they have like these recovery code things um and i have those in a physically secure place i have them like you know on paper in a physically secure place and i would see you know whether that's like
Marco:
You know, a safe somewhere, a lockbox, a bank safety deposit box, like whatever it is for you.
Marco:
I would suggest doing that.
Marco:
You know, humans are pretty good at guarding physical important things.
Marco:
You know, we have important documents that we have to keep as as people on Earth and things like that.
Marco:
And so, you know, we've gotten good at like guard this physical piece of paper as if it's very important to you.
Marco:
And so whatever mechanism you have in place for that, I would say do that.
Marco:
The risk to somebody like most of us is not super high because most risk of losing access or having hackers gain access to our accounts would usually happen remotely.
Marco:
It would usually be internet-based, not somebody breaking into your house and finding your lockbox and stuff like that.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, use those recovery codes.
Marco:
I don't use those for everything.
Marco:
Like a lot of those I will just store in 1Password or Apple Keychain or both in some weird messy way.
Marco:
But, you know, use those, use the backup code, store them somewhere, but for the really important stuff like 1Password itself or maybe Dropbox, you know, depending on like, you know, how you're using these different services, maybe your Apple ID, the really important stuff that you would need to like bootstrap a new device or a new access setup is
Marco:
Have actually the physical codes for those things so that you can, you know, if all of your hardware is gone, whether it gets stolen or maybe it gets destroyed in a flood or a fire or whatever, if all your hardware is gone, how do you get back into your digital life?
Marco:
If you can just, if you like, you buy a new laptop or iPhone, how do you get back in?
Marco:
Have a plan for that in some way that does not rely on you just having access to another device.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsor this week, Squarespace.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join and hear all our fun new stuff at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
So, I don't even know what to do.
Casey:
So, I am subscribed to UPS My Choice is what it used to be called.
Casey:
I don't know what it's called now.
Casey:
What that lets you do is say, okay, I am the resident at such and such an address.
Casey:
Whenever something is shipped to me via UPS, let me know and give me a tracking number and let me know some information about it.
Casey:
So a day or two ago, I got an email saying that something was coming to me and was arriving, I guess, that day or whatever.
Casey:
I was like, well, that's odd.
Casey:
I have no idea what this is.
Casey:
And so I signed into UPS My Choice, and it said that there was a 36-pound package coming to me, which...
Casey:
It was a little bit confusing, to say the least.
Casey:
Dog food?
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
I didn't have anything that I knew about that was coming that was heavy.
Casey:
And it is relatively unusual that we get shipments for anything but chewy if it's dog food time, which it's almost, but not yet, and Amazon.
Casey:
So we do get UPS shipments and occasionally FedEx shipments, but it's fairly unusual.
Casey:
And usually Aaron and I will be aware of what's forthcoming.
Casey:
So I see there's a 36 pound shipment and I was able to log into my choice and get information about where it was shipped from.
Casey:
And I genuinely don't remember the town, but it was quickly apparent to me that Marco has been taking care of things within his house.
Casey:
Now, what's funny is I think it was literally the day before that we had recorded the IMAX tier list.
Casey:
I guess this was Monday because we recorded Sunday nights.
Casey:
I guess this was Monday, maybe Tuesday.
Casey:
So it was like a day within 48 hours of recording the IMAX tier list where I had thoughts.
Casey:
about a couple of iMacs.
Casey:
Most of the iMacs didn't care.
Casey:
A couple of them, though, I had some real big thoughts.
Casey:
And one of them that, and I won't name what it is.
Casey:
Well, I guess I have to name what it is.
Casey:
I will say that I have really big thoughts about the iMac Pro.
Casey:
And I went to the front door after this package was delivered, and it was one of those, not trapezoidal, but one of those pizza wedge-shaped boxes.
Casey:
And I knew immediately.
Casey:
Well, actually, my first thought was, oh, he sent me the LG 5K, which actually I wouldn't mind having another.
Casey:
You know, it would be kind of fun to have that as a porch monitor rather than my beloved but not very remarkable 4K monitor.
Casey:
And then it occurred to me, oh, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
This is not a rectangle.
Casey:
This is a pie.
Casey:
Oh, God, he sent me an iMac.
Casey:
And I opened it up, and sure enough, I am now the reluctant owner of your old iMac Pro.
Casey:
So thanks, bud.
Casey:
What the hell am I supposed to do with this?
Marco:
Did you open it?
Casey:
I saw that there was what appeared to be an iMac in there.
Casey:
I didn't look closely at it.
Casey:
Oh, God.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
You're such an amateur about getting junk from Marco.
John:
You have to look in the box.
John:
What are you doing?
Casey:
Is it nearby?
Casey:
It's downstairs, but I am happy to go get it.
Casey:
Oh, Jesus.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do I need to go downstairs?
Casey:
There could be a live animal in there.
Casey:
Carry it upstairs and open it up.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
I'm going to disappear for a minute, so God only knows what you're going to say while I'm gone.
Casey:
But all right.
Casey:
I will let you know when I'm back.
Casey:
I am disappearing.
Marco:
Keep the box closed and carry it upstairs.
Marco:
Carry it upstairs closed.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
You have to pause.
Casey:
We're going to have to edit this out.
Casey:
Vamp for a minute, because I want to hear about John's stuff.
Marco:
So, vamp.
Marco:
I'm leaving.
Marco:
I'm leaving.
Marco:
I'm leaving.
Marco:
All right.
Casey:
Okay, I'm back.
Marco:
I want you to open it up on the air.
Casey:
Okay, okay, hold on.
Casey:
So what I'm going to try to do here, because I don't have the slack on my microphone, so hold on, bear with me.
John:
Just use the microphone on the LG, it'll be fine.
Casey:
Too soon.
Casey:
All right, hold on, I've got to take all this God darn Velcro off.
Casey:
I'm going to have so many regrets when I try to put this together tomorrow.
John:
It's a puppy.
Casey:
That's not funny.
Marco:
It's a 37-pound puppy.
John:
I'm saying this.
John:
We have to always get a box like that and not actually look what's in it.
Casey:
I thought I peeked at it.
Casey:
And I'm guessing I take everything out.
John:
Come on.
John:
You don't know what he's hiding in there.
John:
It could all be packed with Kindles.
Casey:
It better not be.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
I think I ran out.
Marco:
I sent them all to you.
Casey:
I can't.
Casey:
Okay, I can't do this very well.
Casey:
I only got some slack, but I've got enough.
Casey:
Oh, Jesus, this weighs a ton.
John:
Don't drop the iMac and don't put it anywhere near the windshield of any of your cars.
Casey:
Aaron has now come in and is very concerned.
John:
Imagine if he shatters his glass desk by touching it with the corner of the iMac Pro.
John:
Oh, that'd be amazing.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
She's helping me lift it because I am chained to the desk here.
Casey:
Oh, there's actually Tom Bins in here.
Casey:
Oh, I like that.
Casey:
In the keyboard slot in the iMac box.
Casey:
All right.
John:
Did you not send the peripherals because you were using them?
Casey:
No, I did not look closely enough, clearly.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
There's the box that once had a power supply in it.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Let me put this back on here.
Casey:
A power supply?
Casey:
What are you talking about?
Casey:
The cord.
Casey:
Oh, there's cords in here.
John:
Yeah, the power cord.
Casey:
Oh, mother of God.
Casey:
This looks like the connector for an LG.
Casey:
All right, hold on.
How do we get this out?
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I just lifted the goddamn thing, and I can tell from the stupid lifting mechanism, this is the LG 5K.
Casey:
You're finally rid of it.
Casey:
It fits perfectly in an iMac Pro box.
Casey:
Actually, I need to take a picture of this because it is flawless.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
The live listeners won't be able to see this.
Casey:
And my office is a freaking mess right now.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
I got to take a picture of this because it fits flawlessly in the box.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
This is perfect.
Casey:
Well, hey, now I can tell you I am not the reluctant owner of your old iMac Pro.
Casey:
I'm the happy owner of a second LG 5K.
Casey:
That's super delightful.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So you looked in the box, and you couldn't tell the difference between an LG 5K and an iMac Pro.
Casey:
I only glanced at it.
Marco:
I had, like, that big, like, white, like, kind of foamy wrapper that goes around the iMac.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
That's all I saw, and it looked right to me.
Marco:
I still had that, so I put that around the LG because it fits perfectly.
Casey:
I'm going to put it in Slack, and then maybe, Marco, you can... This is not a great picture because it's dark in here, blah, blah, blah, but maybe, Marco, you can...
John:
I mean, you can turn the lights on.
John:
It's okay.
Casey:
No, because the... Well, first of all, I want to remain sleepy in my sleepy clothes and my sleepy shirt, but beyond that... You just lifted a 40-pound box.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Tell me about it.
Casey:
But beyond that, the more important thing is that there's a piddly little teeny tiny light bulb in the overhead fan, which I've now been forbidden to turn on during recording, and...
Casey:
And even if I did turn it on, the light bulb is currently blown because I never use it.
Casey:
So there is no light in this room.
John:
It was like a scene from Blair Witch.
John:
It's the lighting you've got going on in this room.
Casey:
So anyway, so I've just put it in Slack for you two, and maybe we can make it the chapter art for this chapter.
John:
Yeah, what's missing there is a gigantic dark silver space gray foot of an iMac Pro.
Casey:
Well, at a glance, it looked like it, especially because you can see more of the foot now, but Marco had intelligently put the box, the cardboard box that slots in that spot.
Casey:
So I saw something that was dark that was the shape of an iMac that was in an iMac Pro box.
Casey:
It's clearly an iMac Pro.
Casey:
And I got to be honest with you, I was not happy about receiving this iMac Pro, because what the f***?
Casey:
am I supposed to do with an iMac Pro today?
Casey:
Are you happier getting a second 5K?
Casey:
Yes, I actually am.
Casey:
I genuinely am, which it's going to be great.
John:
Even after the start of recording today when your 5K may have been to blame.
John:
That's true, actually.
Casey:
Now I have a redundant 5K.
Casey:
See, it's perfect.
Casey:
Flawless victory.
Casey:
Thanks, bud.
Casey:
I appreciate it.
Marco:
There's a house in our town that like every summer as decoration, they set up a big row of bobbleheads on their front retaining wall.
Marco:
That's going to be your desk.
Marco:
It's just going to be like this row of bobblehead monitors.
Marco:
The funny thing is...
Casey:
Hand to God, I was trying to lift this thing out of the cardboard shell that rests in, and I went to lift, because it's sitting upright, and I went to lift up from the base of the screen, and that bastard just came flying up, just like that piece of crap LG stand loves to do.
Casey:
And I was pretty damn sure that was the LG 5K, but the moment that thing came flying almost out of the box when I lifted it up, oh, nope, that's 5K.
Casey:
I'd know that piece of crap stand anywhere.
Yeah.
Casey:
Thanks, bud.
Casey:
I feel much better now.
Casey:
And a couple of Tom Bins, too.
Casey:
You love me.
Casey:
You really love me.
John:
So when you say Tom Bins, what are they?
Casey:
Like little pouches?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Like little cable organizer pouches.
Marco:
Yeah, I had some.
Marco:
So I was cleaning out the house to sell it.
Marco:
And when you are getting ready to move, as you're packing things, you're like, do I really want to pay to move this and then have this in the new place?
Marco:
Do I like this thing enough that I want to actually move it?
Marco:
And that can make you make some real honest decisions.
Marco:
And it can be really difficult to make some of those decisions.
Marco:
This was not a difficult one.
Marco:
This is what I was using last week when we recorded and I edited the show last week.
Marco:
And as we're doing all that, I'm like, do I want to move this thing that I hate?
Marco:
I hate this monitor so much.
Marco:
so instead i i had to pack it into something um so instead of packing it into a box on onto the box truck and having to haul it back and forth and take up space and and move it into the new place eventually and deal with it i mean you know what i'm just gonna pack this into whatever box i can find in my attic that it fits in and mail it to virginia so there you go
Casey:
Thanks, bud.
Casey:
So now I'm happy to report as of minutes ago.
Casey:
Well, actually, as of days ago, I just didn't realize it.
Casey:
As of minutes ago, if I go to work on the porch, which I actually intended to do today because it was gorgeous here and then never got around to it.
Casey:
Now I can do so by using an LG 5K, which is a much better experience than my LG 4K.
Casey:
So this is this is delightful.
Marco:
It can be your outdoor rated monitor.
Casey:
Yes, exactly right.
Casey:
Now it's my kink, too.
Casey:
Look at that.
Casey:
All right, John, since you apparently did a better job of investigating and interrogating your gift shipment, can you tell me what you learned about what Marco shipped you?
John:
I was going to say that if he actually had sent you the iMac Pro, then maybe he sent the wrong shipments to the wrong people.
John:
But now that I see it's a 5K, he sent the right thing, because I sure as hell don't want that thing.
LAUGHTER
John:
it might have been a better troll to send it to you yeah and i have to say to start marco occasionally does this and it's a very nice thing that he does he's sending us things and as he makes it sound like oh i'm getting rid of my junk but honestly there's these are things that have value and it's nice that he takes the time and spends the money to ship them to his friends instead of just like free cycling them or trying to sell them or whatever so i just want to say thank you to marco it's a very nice thing that you do when you get rid of your old tech stuff and you send it to us we appreciate it
Casey:
Yes, especially now that I know what's in there and it's not just an iMac Pro that I was planning to just bring to Apple and get store credit for because I didn't know what the hell else to do with it.
Casey:
But no, I don't even want to think about how much it was to ship this damn thing to me.
Casey:
So thank you.
Marco:
It was like 50 bucks.
Marco:
And best 50 bucks I ever spent, I think.
Marco:
But still, it's a nice thing.
Marco:
But that said...
John:
The things that Marco sends aren't always are sometimes puzzling.
John:
And I think this is the biggest stumper that I've gotten ever.
John:
First, when Marco is in this mode and he's like, I'm getting rid of my stuff and I'm going to be nice and pay to ship it to my friends.
John:
One thing that isn't in his mind is, let me find out how I can pack this safely.
John:
That's why he uses Kindles, for example, as packing material.
John:
Oh, there's a gap between this tech product and the edge of the box.
John:
What if I just wedge three or four Kindles in there?
John:
There.
John:
Now it doesn't move around as much.
John:
That's about the extent of his packing abilities.
John:
So I have to say, the contents of this box, it was in a cardboard box, and there was no padding whatsoever on anything.
John:
It was like the thinnest piece of corrugated cardboard you can possibly imagine, and then...
John:
stuff right and it was packed in to try to say well i think he was actually looking in the house what kind of things do i have that i could wedge in here so things don't move around too much but that's again the extent of the packing that is correct yeah because it looks like it looks like i i need something that's skinny that will fit here that will fill this space so what he found let's start he there is something that it's a it's a blu-ray reader and writer it's the buffalo that popular one that everyone was uh saying you should get this one if you want to rip and write blu-ray
John:
optical discs uh it's got a you know a usb connected dc power connector so that the cables are in there and the things in there i already have a blu-ray reader i think i have a samsung but i don't actually have a writer so it's nice to have this assuming the writer still works and it wasn't just packing material so that one it's like okay i don't think i really need this i've never actually written a blu-ray but i you know i do read them occasionally if my other one dies now i have a second one and it's small so whatever although you know it's like micro usb if you remember what that connector looks like it's gross but anyway
John:
So there's that.
John:
Then there is a plastic spindle, if you remember those from back in the day, of writable Blu-ray discs.
John:
Hey, convenient.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I still don't quite know why I would ever want to write anything to a Blu-ray disc, but if I did, I don't have to buy them.
John:
Oh, it's thrilling.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Assuming the discs in there aren't all bad at this point.
John:
Oh, they won't be.
John:
Because did you see what kind they are?
John:
No, I didn't.
John:
Let's see.
John:
What does it say?
John:
They're M-discs.
John:
Permanent storage solutions.
John:
Designed to last up to a thousand years.
Ha ha!
John:
Oh, goodness.
John:
Up to, it says, though.
John:
So that could be like 30 seconds, right?
John:
Well, yeah, technically.
John:
Because 30 seconds is also up to 1,000 years.
John:
So maybe I'll try that.
John:
Maybe I'll try writing some stuff.
John:
But that's not the main content of this box.
John:
That was packing material to be wedged against the main contents of this box.
John:
Those were spacers.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Given that I've described these spacers, Casey, can you think of what might be similar dimensions to a spindle of optical disks and a Blu-ray writer?
John:
How many optical disks was it?
John:
It's like an inch-high stack, and then the Blu-ray writer is a square about the size of a Blu-ray.
Casey:
Oh, God, I don't know.
Casey:
Kindles?
Casey:
I have no idea.
Casey:
USB Pre?
John:
I would never get rid of one of those.
John:
Yeah, fair.
John:
What is in this box?
John:
I'll put the picture in of this amazing packing jogger on our Slack so you can look at it.
John:
It's two full-size HomePods.
Ha ha ha!
John:
Look at this.
John:
Just look at this packing job, Casey.
John:
Look at the piece of cardboard between them.
John:
Who is he kidding with that piece of cardboard?
John:
Like, this is my separator material.
John:
See, it's like padding.
John:
I'm amazed that these things came through.
John:
I'm not going to say unscathed because the HomePods are a little worse for wear, but honestly, I can't tell if that's damage incurred during shipment or damage incurred when they were at Marco's house.
John:
I can't tell.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
So now here's the conundrum.
John:
All right.
John:
So I already have a full-size HomePod.
John:
I got one when they were released, right?
John:
And it's in my living room doing its thing.
John:
i've got these two things i'm like oh two home pods uh well it was like first i thought are these the ones that were flaking out in marco yeah they're kind of all flaking out they all flake out yeah yeah i mean so far mine hasn't been mostly but i barely use it um but i'm like okay well i'm sure i'll be able to find a place for these in the house and since i've got them i've been puzzling it over and i cannot figure out what the hell i'm gonna do with these things
John:
Neither could I. That's why I said it to you.
John:
I went into my daughter's room the other day, and she was listening to music on her Google Home Mini, the really, really tiny puck thing.
John:
And she's listening to music on it.
John:
I'm like, oh, this is it.
John:
I immediately go, boom.
John:
Perfect.
John:
Would you like me to replace that Google Home Mini with a HomePod?
John:
It'll sound way better, and you'll have a HomePod in your room.
John:
Isn't that cool?
John:
You could even have a stereo pair.
John:
And before I could get the words in her mouth, she's like, nope, nope, nope, nope.
John:
Can you guess why she didn't want it?
John:
Because she likes the Google stuff?
John:
Because Siri sucks.
John:
yeah i was i'll go with siri sucks you're not thinking like teenager too big it's too big the google home mini is tiny and unobtrusive and this thing is here's the thing we talk about this with like the iMac like why does it have to be so thin and who cares about that or whatever non-tech people people who aren't into tech things as like a hobby do not want technology products to be to be dominant in their space
John:
the home pod is too big for a teenage girl's bedroom if she doesn't care about home pods or like any of that tech stuff or whatever it takes up too much volume it is too prominent it's too ugly it draws too much attention to itself whereas the tiny little puck of the google home mini is practically buried under the other stuff that's there it's like so unobtrusive uh and then secondarily she said because she never wants to do anything that i tell her to do um
John:
so at least she's self-aware but it's totally true i mean she is a teenager that's that's their job so i'm like okay what am i gonna do with these i briefly thought about replacing the speakers that are on my desk for for my mac no you can't do that it's too laggy exactly as i remember when we talked about it i'm like no i don't want to deal with the lag and not only laggy but but do i want flakiness involving audio on my computer no i do not
John:
My speakers are cheap, cruddy speakers, but they're connected directly with an analog audio cable to the back of my Mac, and there's no latency, and they work every single time.
John:
So that's out.
John:
I'm looking around the house like, well, I've got one HomePod in here.
John:
If I put the other HomePod, I'm going to get a stereo pair, but I have surround speakers in that room with the fancy speakers that I bought see past episodes.
John:
There's not really any home place for like...
John:
even just to do stereo music and my one big home pod is like buried in the corner behind everything as a punishment for being bad um like it's got like photos in front of it and it's like like we use it to play christmas carols when we're decorating the tree and when we're decorating trees actually relocated to the other side of the room but that's it but like if i'm gonna play stereo music i have much better like full surround stereo speaker system that i could run and i don't have a place to put two home pods if i wanted to do like let them do their home pod
John:
thing like i don't i don't know where they would go and plus i have two extra ones not just one um i thought about putting them as the tv speakers to the upstairs tv that was mixed immediately my wife said i barely use that tv and i don't want two giant home pods in her bedroom and honestly there's not really a place for them there either the kitchen i mean like there's not a lot of place that we no one really listens to music out loud in the house so i'm still puzzling it over right now they're just sitting on the desk behind me
John:
looking very sad, but their cords dangling off the end of the desk.
John:
And I don't know what I'm going to do with them, but I'll figure something out.
John:
I mean, worst case scenario, I could like, I should have offered them to my son.
John:
We just took him to college the other day.
John:
Do you want these for your dorm room?
John:
He almost certainly doesn't, but maybe he would say, sure, why not?
John:
Or something like that.
John:
But we have to, we're driving a mini fridge out to him in a little bit because we're taking separate trips for
John:
various reasons oh because your car isn't big enough to hold it all mr a sedan is all you need no it is absolutely big enough to hold it all but i didn't want to pack it all in and also you have to remember so when when your kid goes to school close to uh where you live the phenomenon of oh i don't have to make sure i have everything because i'll just remember what we what what i don't have and ask for a second trip that is absolutely in effect just
John:
like by the time we got home i had text messages oh can you bring me this and this and this and we and we legit forgot at least one thing we forgot like his mattress topper thing which we meant to bring with us because it was in the basement so we're going out there a second time no matter what so anyway maybe these will come with me and i'll say hey you want these and he'll probably say no for the same variety of reasons and you know anyway uh i'm puzzling it over but uh yeah now i've got two uh sad looking big home pods and a bunch of optical discs
John:
fun yeah at least they're not that big i mean they were the full-size ones i mean just like the box like i didn't get a gigantic box arriving in my house or whatever yeah and i honestly as soon as i saw the package coming i kind of had a notion of what they might be but the second i saw it sitting on my porch i'm like oh it's on pots
John:
just tell from the weight and the dimensionality i know what a big home pod's like that's what's in here yeah because the big home pods are very heavy like they're very dense objects like you pick one up you're like whoa so do you have any suggestions for what i can do with these because i'm really it's really stumping me like i'm not against them like i think they're good speakers they're two good speakers and i can airplay to them like they should have a function somewhere in my life i would strongly advise not using the ministerio pair
Marco:
if that if that changes things so why stereo pair home pods are so buggy standalone home pods are bad enough so standalone home pods are themselves quite buggy but the bugginess goes up dramatically with stereo pairs which is a shame because so does the sound quality and so it sucks that you can't really use them in the way they sound the best if you want them to be reliable at all oh i thought of a use i thought of a use gone continue
Marco:
I would say anywhere that you might put a single HomePod that maybe could use an improvement in volume or quality, put this there.
Marco:
Or mail them to Casey.
John:
No, I don't want them.
John:
I don't want to keep sending these like the sisterhood of the traveling HomePods.
John:
But now here's the thought.
John:
So when COVID started, we made my wife a little home office downstairs.
John:
I think we talked about this.
John:
We got her a nice fancy...
John:
standing desk motorized thing and she her work gave her a bunch of like work at home equipment including a gigantic like 32 inch dell monitor or something or other it's not retina but it's huge um anyway she's got her office down there and at some point i got the sonos uh toblerone thing um what does that call the rome yeah the rome the rome is the one that looks like a little uh toblerone right the triangle yeah anyway um she's got that down there but that's you know not a good speaker
John:
No.
John:
So that means she wanted that.
John:
But she said, you know, she had like a little mini Bluetooth speaker and she saw that I had my room that I use in the shower.
John:
She's like, oh, I want one of those.
John:
So I got her one.
John:
So she does listen to music out loud.
John:
And so I should bring both HomePods down there because there's plenty of room down there.
John:
Like it's just her office area.
John:
There's not a lot of junk down there.
John:
The only downside is if they are flaky, I'm going to hear immediately.
John:
Just give me back my Sonos thing.
John:
Because at least it plays music when I want it to play.
John:
It's worth a try.
John:
Yeah, I'm definitely going to try that.
John:
I mean, she knows I got them and she didn't immediately say, can I have them in my office?
John:
So I think she might be kind of wary of them, too, but she does listen to the program.
John:
So I'll make a second attempt at pitching her on having these in her office.
John:
But she might also say they're kind of big and, you know, whatever.
Marco:
I mean, they sound amazing for their size, too.
Marco:
What's so frustrating to me about the HomePods is that I love the way they sound.
Marco:
They sound great.
Marco:
They're just really hard to use because they lack any kind of input.
Marco:
And so I can't bypass their flaky smarts because you have to still use AirPlay to connect to them.
Marco:
So that's no good.
Marco:
There's no line in.
Marco:
There's no input method at all besides the flakiness.
Marco:
But once you can actually get them to connect and use them, they sound incredible.
Marco:
But that's just such a huge asterisk and such a huge downside for them.
Marco:
It makes it really hard to use them.
Casey:
You could have just gotten a bunch more Sonos stuff and that would have been fine.
Casey:
I guess Marco isn't sending it to you for free, though.
John:
Yeah, again, I didn't have a need for this, but I'm just going to put them down there and not tell her and just like get them set up somehow.
John:
And just like next time she goes down there, I'll start playing music.
John:
And she'll be like, whoa, where's this great music coming from?
John:
that's that's optimistic i think that's how we that's how we imagine it will work but it's not how it's gonna actually work i think i think it'll be more like you'll be like standing on the stairs trying to make your phone connect to them and you'll be like hold on hold on just wait just hold on one more second one more second just let me let me get this going but more likely she's gonna go down there and she's gonna say why did you put your junk by my desk get that off of there like she's gonna think i put them down there to store them not that i'm trying to do a nice thing and it's like you can listen to music it's like you know that stuff that marco sent you is your problem don't get it near my office